


The constellations reveal themselves one star at a time

by liminalweirdo



Category: Ginger Snaps (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Fix-It, Post-Canon, the cure works
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-02
Updated: 2019-06-30
Packaged: 2020-02-16 03:22:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 93,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18683134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liminalweirdo/pseuds/liminalweirdo
Summary: Sometimes, the end isn't the end.





	1. Chapter 1

**BRIGITTE**

The cops come.  
   
Somehow, after, that fact is hilarious to Brigitte, because no one in Bailey Downs ever calls the cops. Ever. She realizes, later, that it must have been their screams — hers. And Sam’s — that alerted someone. After. It's hilarious _after_ because in the actual moment the police arrive Brigitte is too shell-shocked and hollowed out to do anything. Someone pulls her off of her sister's body like a ragdoll, and Brigitte just goes wherever they place her.  
   
The cop that pulled her to her feet is a woman. Heavyset, blonde. She's got dark, dark eyes and Brigitte can't understand anything she's saying. She’s being spoken to in a gentle voice, but words do not, cannot register in her mind.  
   
There's an ambulance outside when she emerges, held by the upper arm by the female cop, being sort of pushed and tugged because she can't quite get a handle on her own body. She's always felt alien in it, but this is different. This is like trying to move through full anaesthesia. Does she even still have a body at all? Why is there an ambulance? Everyone is dead.  
   
It comes back to her in bits and pieces. First there are interrogations at the police department. (She realizes later that they're asking her about her mother, and not about what happened to Brigitte in her house.) Brigitte barely speaks, she can barely grasp what's happening around her. Eventually she is deemed unfit for trial, and Pamela is sent to prison for the murder of sixteen-year-old Trina Sinclair.  
   
Here's how it breaks down:  
   
To the police, Trina's death and the monster in Brigitte's basement are unrelated cases. There is third-rate, tabloid speculation that Pamela had somehow trapped the Beast of Bailey Downs, or cultivated it, somehow — a chimera of aggressive, half-wild things — in order to unleash a kind of surrogate serial-killing within the Ontario suburb — a step or two up from razorblades in candy bars, but certainly more destructive — but those rumours are dismissed by the police and the courts. It was just a freak accident that the creature got into their house on Halloween. That it attacked Brigitte and killed Sam. Ginger's ‘disappearance’ is attributed to Death by Beast.  
   
They're not wrong.  
   
Brigitte knows this in the same way she knows that they sliced the beast open and expelled the contents of its stomach, searching for the missing Fitzgerald girl— for Ginger. She knows this and wishes so hard that the didn't.  
   
In some ways, though, it exploded this childish fantasy she had entertained at the very edges of her mind, that maybe Ginger was inside the body of that thing that she became, just hiding out in there, unharmed, like Little Red Riding Hood.  
   
Instead, it's really just Ginger they cut open on some sterilized cold autopsy table somewhere.  
  
Brigitte is kept at the police station while they try to find Henry. When they do, however, Henry doesn't want to come pick her up. In fact, Henry wants nothing to do with her or Pamela or his allegedly missing daughter at all.  
   
Brigitte has never really experienced abandonment in that way before. Not smacked in the face by it the way she is in that moment, waiting in the cold back room of the station, picking apart the little Styrofoam cup of water they'd given her hours ago. In some ways, she's more incensed that he isn't concerned about Ginger's disappearance than that he left _her_ here, covered in dried blood and shivering under fluorescent lights and the wary eyes of the police.  
   
So there was no one to release her to, and they couldn't send her home so they brought her to the hospital to have her hand looked at, and probably, Brigitte also thought afterwards, for a psychological evaluation. They also seemed rather unnerved by her and probably just didn't want to deal with her anymore. Her apparent stoicism, her limited responses.  
   
At least at the hospital she could sleep, and that was all she really wanted to do. Even without the aid of painkillers, she crashed hard, didn't hear the sounds of the machines half-hidden behind curtains in the shared ward, the squeaking, soft-soled shoes of the nurses. She just slipped into blissful blackness. Into nothing.  
   
She knows she can't stay here in the hospital. She's already pulled back the bandages around her hand to see that the cut is almost entirely healed. She has half a mind to slit it open again, a reminder of what she'd shared with Ginger, but she can't find anything to do it with. Plus she is so goddamn tired of being covered in blood.  
   
She makes vague plans, her mind sluggish and reluctant to deal with the trauma of her situation. She needs to find her clothes. She needs to go back to her house, get the monkshood, find the syringe, because she’s a danger to the people here in this hospital.  
   
She never gets the chance to leave, though, because someone, somewhere gets their wires crossed, and she's called back into the police station again. Why can't they do everything at once? she wonders. And she thinks that this is so typical of Canada, this lack of communication between departments that, by rights should be working closely together, that she faces it, at fifteen years old, without surprise, just utter exhaustion. She supposes it's better than the panic that she knows is roiling somewhere beneath the surface of all of this loss.  
  
She thinks maybe she has no idea who she is without Ginger to define her.  
   
She isn't allowed to see or speak to her mother, and she doesn't know what Pamela would want, except she tried so hard to give Brigitte and Ginger an out that Brigitte cannot bear to disappoint her now… The very first time she's ever been cut to pieces at the thought of disappointing her mother, and it means putting her behind bars. But at least, Brigitte thinks, that will vindicate Pam — Mom — at least in some small way.  
   
It's during her second full day in court, saying the same thing — that she didn't know about whatever Pamela was doing, over and over, _I don't know, I don't know_ — not even one full week after Brigitte's entire existence was ripped apart by the jaws of some hungry, mythological thing that something, finally, gives.  
   
Someone mentions Sam's name in court and it slices through Brigitte's chest like a fresh scalpel, spreading heat. She thinks it's shame, but she barely has a moment to register the emotion — the first real one she’s had in days — because they're talking about him in the present tense. It filters into her emotional catatonia slowly, and then someone says “Mr. McDonald has already been acquitted of all charges laid against him involving the death of Ms. Sinclair. Your Honour, do you really want us to pull an injured man from hospital just to testify the exact same thing again? We're wasting _time_ here…"  
   
And Brigitte _slams_ back into herself. Finally time and space and her own untrustworthy body comes back to her — brittle and thinner than before and awkward as ever, but _hers_. And suddenly the courtroom is too hot, and the bench is hard beneath her thighs. The shirt she's wearing (provided to her by the lawyer that was called in to speak on her behalf because she is a minor) scratches her neck and cuts into her underarms and smells like the most depressing, half-forgotten racks at the back of a thrift shop and _Sam_ is…  
  
~  
  
Back at the hospital, Brigitte practically crashes into the reception booth. “I’m—” she's panting. “Here to visit Sam McDonald.”  
   
The woman at reception looks at her coldly for a moment, just long enough for Brigitte to sink back into herself a little, arms wrapping tight around her stomach, fingers digging into the unfamiliar material of this stupid thrift-shop shirt.  
   
“I don't have a record of a Sam McDonald in this building.”  
   
Brigitte stares at her, then swallows. “I... but I thought—”  
   
“You might try St. Michael's the woman says to her. Brigitte has no idea where St. Michael’s is. She stares blankly at the woman for a moment and then turns away, biting her fingernails. Could it be possible that she misunderstood, in court? Maybe she just heard something she wanted to hear. And all those things she'd thought on the way back here, about Sam surviving, healing quickly because he was infected now... all those things she'd told herself about Ginger’s jaws maybe missing the carotid artery... they all seem so flimsy now, as liable to blow away as bits of paper.  
   
The woman sighs behind her, and then says “We've got a Samuel McDonald.”  
   
And just like that Brigitte is flooded with hope again. So much that she can't even be annoyed at this receptionist's fucking power games. “He's in room 416.” She gives Brigitte and endless list of directions that Brigitte only half-grasps, and then asks "How old are you?"  
   
Brigitte furrows her brow. “I’m fifteen.”  
   
“Hm... Can I see your I.D. please?”  
   
“I don’t have it.”  
   
“If you're fourteen or under, you need to be accompanied by an adult.”  
   
A man leans back in his chair from the other reception desk and into Brigitte's field of vision. “Jesus Christ, Judith,” he says. “Just let her go.”  
   
“Thanks,” Brigitte tells him, and runs before they can stop her.  
   
Outside room 416, she paces because she can't bring herself to go in. It isn't until a doctor comes out and almost crashes into her, despite her trying to get out of the way, that she has to do something other than linger in the hallway.  
   
“He's still awake if you're visiting,” the doctor tells her, and she has nothing to do under his gaze but go inside. Once she’s there, she meets Sam's eyes and they both freeze while the door shuts slowly, softly behind her, and clicks into place.  
   
The silence lingers, and it is awful. And finally Sam asks “Did you save her?” His voice is hoarse and his throat is bandaged as far into the hospital shirt as she can see, and his right arm is in a sling, and Brigitte realizes that he doesn't know _anything_. He doesn’t know yet that Brigitte? She failed them both — Sam and her sister.  
  
She failed them both, and she betrayed Sam and she left him there because she thought he was already dead. She opens her mouth to say something, to say 'no,' but her voice cracks, squeaks, before a word even comes out.  
   
“No, of course you didn’t,” Sam says, and it's somehow soft and kind. He always makes things that way. “How the fuck could you have?”  
   
“I could’ve—“ but what she could have done she doesn't know. It hurts to think about it.  
   
Sam licks dry lips and clears his throat painfully then says. “She was way too far gone, Brigitte.”

**SAM**

“I left you there to die,” Brigitte says, even though her breathing is being buffeted like a sapling in the wind. She's just barely holding it together. There are tears in her eyes, Sam can see them from where he is lying on the bed, but they don't fall. He's always astounded by her resolve. She's got such defences, this girl, and he's completely floored by it every time.  
   
At the same time, it does something to him, it twists in his chest, because she shouldn't have to be like that. “You didn't really have much choice.” He says it slow and careful, like he did when he told her that she might kill Ginger trying to save her.  
   
She hisses out this hot breath through half-bared teeth and shakes her head and he doesn't know if she's furious or going to pieces. He doesn't know what to ask her or what else to say, so he just comes out with the most idiotic: “Are you okay?” because obviously she’s not. But he can't ask what happened. Not right now. That's not fair to her, and all he needs to know... jesus, all he really needs to know is whether or not Brigitte's safe. Right now he can see her, whole and capable. Infected, maybe, but so is he. And the cure works, that's what she said. The cure works, and he's got to get the fuck out of this hospital before they realize how fast he's healing.  
   
She hasn't answered him. Can't, maybe. It was a bad question. “Look, I... I was just about to try and get out of here,” he says, like this is a bar he's bored of and not a hospital that literally saved his life. Sewn him up from the inside out.  
   
“I'm coming with you,” she tells him.  
   
Brigitte's clothes had been in a plastic bag in her room. She leaves him picking at the tape over the saline drip in his arm to look for his, but there are none. His clothes were too soaked in blood to be salvaged. “Well, fuck,” Sam says.  
   
“Wait here,” Brigitte tells him, and then disappears. Like he's going to fucking go anywhere dressed in a hospital gown. She wanders down the hall and for a minute he wonders if she'll actually come back.  
   
She does, a set of scrubs in her arms. “Here,” she says, dropping them unceremoniously onto the bed. Sam stares at them. “Where did you—?”  
   
“I took them from someone's locker.”  
  
There are little ducks on them. He understands, to some capacity, that this is so ridiculous it might be funny, but he can’t quite get there in this moment. She turns her back on him as he gathers everything up and goes into the bathroom to change. While he's in there, she watches the saline slowly make a little damp circle on the bedsheets. He emerges and, without another word, they go.  
  
~  
   
They go back to the greenhouse. Maybe Brigitte assumes he has a plan, but Sam's just making it up as he goes along. Regardless he needs to get rid of these scrubs, see how much money he has. He needs to deal with the fact that he's turning into a literal fucking Halloween monster, slowly but surely, just like Ginger, just like Brigitte. He keeps looking at her like she is the metronome to which he can set the beat of his living heart. If she still looks human, acts human, so does he.  
   
He wonders if it's like madness. If he'll even know when he starts to be too far gone. He wonders if Ginger knew or even cared. He wonders if she would have cared if it weren't for the virus, or if it was the virus that made her the way that she was.  
   
Back at home, he changes into his own clothes in the bathroom. Comfort clothes — soft and worn and smelling vaguely of soil and green things. He emerges to find Brigitte looking displaced in this space, displaced in her own skin in that stiff white blouse and dark secretarial skirt. He doesn't recall ever seeing her in anything white. It really is an awful shirt. He beckons her over to the closet where his clothes are, and she comes in haltingly, like a frightened dog. He finds the smallest and warmest of his sweaters and holds it out to her. “There's um— shirts, I don't know if you want…”  
   
He steps to the side of his closet, showing her the drawer of his shirts he's pulled out. “You can change in there,” he says, indicating the tiny bathroom.  
   
She doesn't say anything, just slips past him and after a few seconds she emerges back into the main room, dressed in the hoodie he gave her — far too big but brown, and she looks more at home than she has since the hospital. The white button up is in her hand and she looks around for the trash can before dropping it inside. She doesn't come any closer, standing on the opposite side of the TV table as if that will protect her. As if he’s something that she’s afraid of. As if he were a solid ghost.  
   
He figures he might as well be. After everything.  
   
“So,” Sam says, softly, like she's a creature that might startle. She isn't looking at him. She's starting at the floor like she's expecting it to open up beneath her at any moment, like she expects it all to start sliding in towards some impossible centre, like quicksand.  
   
“I'm really sorry,” she says. It comes out of her mouth almost robotically, the way she talks when she’s talking to people on the outside of her impossibly tiny little circle of trust. He thought they were past this, that he was sort of _in it_ , but then again it makes sense that Brigitte would pull all the way back and then some, as soon as she sensed a threat. And Ginger’s gone now, so what does she need him for?  
   
He doesn’t want her apology. “No, don’t. It's not like you could’ve…” he struggles for a moment, the sentence dangling. “Okay… I’m gonna need you to fill me in. What happened?”  
   
She takes this breath that cracks along the edges like too-thin ice beneath the weight of what she's about to say, and then she tells him. About Ginger's death, about how she killed her. Had to. She won't sit down. Just stands there holding herself like she's just keeping the pieces of her thin frame together with sheer willpower and cobbled-together physics. And then she tells him about the cops coming. How she doesn't really remember anything until the hospital and the days spent in the courtroom.  
   
“Courtroom?”  
   
She hesitates a moment too long, and then explains that it’s about Pam's imprisonment for Trina's... disappearance. That's how she says it, with a pause. He thinks she's spoken more at once now than he's ever heard her speak this whole month of knowing her, but she falters there, and her eyes flicker up to his for a moment, and he's hooked there. too. Trina. She knows something, but she's not willing to let it go just yet.  
   
“Trina's still missing?”  
   
“She's dead. She... she slipped at our house, and hit her head. It was an accident. We had to put her in the deep freeze.”  
   
Sam has to let that sink in. Brigitte’s shaking. Sam can see it from across the room, but she can't be cold. The heater's been blasting out heat since Halloween night. He's going to have one hell of a hydro bill.  
  
Brigitte stops explaining suddenly, like maybe Sam will fill in the blanks but when she finally meets his gaze, he must look just as confused, as uncertain as he feels because she continues, but like it hurts her — like pulling barbed wire from a wound. “She came over because she was pissed at me for talking to you. And then— when she was inside she... she slipped. She hit her head on the counter. It was an accident,” she repeats.  
   
Sam knows Trina wouldn’t have just walked into the Fitzgerald’s house like that, but Brigitte’s still protecting Ginger, and Sam… well… he can more or less put the pieces together. Sam has to sit down on the couch. He passes his hands over his face and into his hair and looks up at her again. “So you put her in the fucking _freezer_?” He doesn’t know why that’s all he can think to say, but it seems important. He feels like he’s spinning and wonders if the intravenous painkillers are still running through his bloodstream.  
   
“Our parents came home! What the fuck were we supposed to do? The cops were looking for Ginger, because Trina’d already been in a fight with us.”  
   
“But why the fuck was she at your house in the first place?”  
   
“I don’t know. Because she was jealous? She thought something was going on because you and me weren't careful enough.”  
   
_Fuck_. “Wh—where… is she still _in there_?”  
   
“No. The police... there was... they found her. In the garden shed. We buried her there.”  
   
“ _Jesus_ , Brigitte.”  
   
“I know. I _know_ , but I was trying to protect her.”  
   
_Ginger_. Of course. Everything came back to that. Sam looks at Brigitte for a long time, trying to read her, but she's so hard to read. “It was really an accident?”  
   
“Yes. I swear.”  
   
There was a time where he swore the truth to her too, and she believed him. So okay. She swears it's the truth. So he believes her. He believes her on purpose because that's what people like the two of them do. He doesn't know what kind of relationship this is, if you could call them friends or partners in crime or what, but that's it. It's done now.  
   
“Okay,” Sam says. “Okay.”  
  
~  
  
He peels the bandages off later, in the bathroom, to reveal scars that look like they’re several years old. It fucks him up, somehow, because the trauma is so immediate. He remembers what it felt like to have her teeth sink into his flesh, but more than that he remembers the fear. He remembers looking into Brigitte’s eyes and thinking that there was no way that she was going to save him, not when it meant choosing him over Ginger, and how he’d tried to plead with her anyway.  
  
He’s taken the sling off — doesn’t need it anymore anyway. The scars run from the bottom of his right ear to just above his left collarbone, a mess of scrapes and punctures that will be impossible to explain. His shoulder is a mess, and beneath his shirt, there’s the places below his ribs where the wolf dragged him downstairs. It looks like he’s been mauled by a bear. That’s what he’s fucking going to have to say because nothing else will be believable.  
  
His fucking _throat_ hurts. When he talks, when he takes a deep enough breath. It fucking hurts. And yet, somehow, it all still feels like it might have been worth it.  
  
Except he has no _idea_ what happens now.  
  
He’s just thinking that he should put these bandages back on, because he doesn’t want to face Brigitte with these scars, a stark reminder of the things they did and didn’t do for one another. It’s too much to handle right now. But then the door to Sam’s tiny bathroom is pushed open, and he jumps.  
  
It’s Brigitte, of course. He told her he was going to look at how he was healing. But she’s in this, she wants to see. He half brings his hand up to hide it, but she grabs his wrist and pulls it down, and Sam’s trying to remember if she’s ever actually touched him before because he’s surprised by her strength. And she’s standing very close. There’s still this sharp hit of blood off of her — old now, more earthy than sharp. Her unwashed hair. This is the infection, he knows, the way he can recognize and separate the smells. It makes him stop while she looks. She raises her free hand as though to touch him, touch the scars, and he pulls back instinctively. It hurts internally — like bad strep — she won’t be able to hurt him, though. Not by touching. Not now. All of the wounds from Ginger’s teeth have closed up, at least on the surface.  
  
When he steps back, he hits the wall, sort of stumbles into it because his leg bumps the toilet, and she’s there, pulled close again by her own grip on his wrist. “Brigitte,” he says, maybe as a warning or… something else. Maybe a plea, he thinks, to drop it, but he doesn’t know if she will. For a moment they just stand together, breathing. She hasn’t once raised her eyes from those scars.  
  
What, Sam thinks, is he supposed to do, or say? Here, he’s got this girl that’s lost everything, and she’s somehow still on her feet. She’s going to have a lot of shit to process, he knows that, on some distant level. Right now it’s just him and her in this tiny, cramped bathroom, and it’s so immediate, and so what he finally comes out with is: “I thought maybe you were dead, too.”  
  
Her eyes flicker up to his — this is what he gets. These bits and pieces of her looking at him, into him. It’s never for long. He feels like maybe he’s got the colour of her eyes memorized, but he bets she couldn’t even tell him the colour of his.  
  
“I’m glad you’re not,” he tells her. “I would’ve…” the sentence dangles. _Missed you._ “I’m glad you’re here.”  
  
He doesn’t say he’s glad she’s okay, because she’s not, and Sam never really pushes anything for just his own agenda. And she still has no way to apologize for this, so what she says instead, finally letting go of his wrist, is “You helped me make the monkshood. And you came with me to my house to cure my sister… I feel like the scales are sort of unevenly tipped here. You didn’t even know her… and I just…”  
  
“Neither of us were thinking clearly, Brigitte.”  
  
“It felt pretty clear to me when your blood was in my mouth.”  
  
Sam blinks. Remembers the way the fear had settled in him then, when she’d eaten and vomited up his own blood, like quagmire in his lungs and in his gut, heavy and dark and sick. He’s inside of her too, now, and he wonders if that means anything at all to her.  
  
“So, what?” Sam asks, finally. “You want me dead, is that it?”  
  
“I left you to die.”  
  
“I still don’t see how that was your fault.”  
  
“I chose Ginger.”  
  
Sam nods. “Yeah, I get that, Brigitte. But _I’m_ here. And I don’t know _why_ that is, God knows I’m a piece of shit that’s never done anybody any good, but I’m not fucking dead. So stop blaming yourself for that, too. You’ve got enough on your plate.”  
  
She narrows her eyes at him like she’s trying to suss him out, his self-abasement, his very presence here. Finally she says “I should go.”  
  
“Where?”  
  
“I dunno. I need my stuff. I have to… I have to take care of this.”  
  
“Why are you always acting like you’re in this alone? I’ve been with you every fucking step—”  
  
“You haven’t! You have no idea what it’s like. Look… just, let’s make the monkshood, and let’s… I won’t bother you anymore.”  
  
“What if I want you around?”  
  
“ _Why_?”  
  
“I don’t know, Brigitte, I just do! Can’t we just leave it there?”  
  
She heaves this long-suffering sigh and he watches her. Finally, softly, she says “Can you take me to my house?”  
  
What’s he supposed to say but yes?  
  
It’s all cordoned off, but there are no police present. She sits in the passenger seat chewing her lower lip. “I, um… think maybe you shouldn’t go in there just yet.” He doesn’t think the police do cleanup duty. All that blood. Sam’s heart feels like it’s trying to escape his ribs. She looks back at him, and then nods, and her fingers leave the door handle. “You can stay at my place if you want. For now.”  
  
“Okay,” Brigitte says, so Sam pulls into the neighbouring driveway to turn around — like hers is untouchable, somehow, and they go back the way they came.

**BRIGITTE**

She can’t get her things from her house, so that afternoon finds them pulling into a Wal Mart parking lot. “You need clothes and stuff, don’t you?”  
  
She hesitates. “I don’t have any money.”  
  
“I do,” says Sam. Brigitte pulls a face. “Do you have to come in with me?” Because that’s fucking embarrassing. She’d rather not have him know precisely which ugly pastel pattern she’s going to end up with on her poor-quality packs of underwear. She doesn’t mean to be rude but she is. What was blunt with Ginge is rude with everyone else, but Sam pulls out his wallet anyway, after a beat, and then he’s handing her his debit card. He doesn’t quite let go as she reaches to take it, and she knows what he’s thinking. She’s thinking it too. That maybe she could just take this and blow.  
  
He wets his lips, then meets her eyes. “Pin’s 9-3-3-3,” he says.  
  
“That’s pretty easy to guess.”  
  
“Well, I don’t make a habit of leaving my wallet around.”  
  
She nods and gets out of the car.  
  
She doesn’t get a lot. Just enough to get her by for a couple of days. She doesn’t get anything she doesn’t absolutely need because it’s not her money, and because she doesn’t know where to go, and she doesn’t want to betray Sam again. She doesn’t.  
  
He’s smoking, leaning back against the hood of the car when she comes back. He puts the cigarette out. “Ready?”  
  
She climbs back inside. Next they pick up monkshood from the craft store her mom frequents. Frequented. Brigitte trails Sam through the flower aisles, ducking overhangs and struggling to free the monkshood, when they actually find it, from its tangle of other “spring” flowers. The music played over the loudspeakers sounds tinny and jarring. She pulls the hood of his sweater up to try to block it out.  
  
~  
  
They spend the rest of the day making the cure. It’s quiet. It feels routine, somehow, and that settles strangely in her stomach. The needle pinches her skin where she slides it into the crook of her arm, and the flower stings a little where it enters her bloodstream, but that’s it. She can’t help thinking ‘it can’t be this easy.’ Sam meets her eyes as he pulls the second syringe from his own arm, and she knows he’s thinking the same thing.  
  
Sam’s place is really really small. She knew that, from before, but it feels smaller now that she’s also supposed to be staying the night. Staying. Taking up space. His part of the greenhouse — the part where he lives is literally just one room and a bathroom. He’s got a portable stove and mini fridge in the corner, his desk, and his bed. Beyond that is the grow-op, hidden behind aluminum curtains. He offers her the bed but she doesn’t want to take it, so then Sam bumps around, finding blankets and whatever he’s not using. He makes a bed up on the floor.  
  
“You have a lot of blankets,” she observes. She feels stupid after she says it.  
  
“It gets cold in here in the winter.”  
  
“Oh. Why don’t you have an apartment?”  
  
“I don’t really need one,” Sam says. “I have everything I need… and I like the plants, and the quiet.”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
~  
  
The bed he made for her is pretty comfortable. The floor itself is made of wood, and there’s a rug down, and between that and the heavy wool blanket beneath her, the weighty quilt she’s got pulled up practically over her head, she feels warm and protected. She’s sleeping in one of his shirts, still, because it feels safer, somehow, than the Wal Mart ones, and a pair of dark sweatpants she bought with his card. They’re too big for her. Everything’s always too big for her, but the clothes in the men’s section are cheaper, warmer, and more durable. _Typical_.  
  
She tries to sleep, but there are all these unfamiliar sounds. The mini fridge buzzing gently rattles the kettle on the stove beside it. She considers getting up to move it, but she’s afraid to wake Sam who has been breathing steadily for some time now. She matches her breaths to his, and tries to fall asleep. Some time before morning, it works.  
  
They both wake up to the sound of knocking, and a voice calling “Hello?”  
  
Brigitte sits up half in a panic as Sam mutters a “What the fuck?” and climbs out of bed. He has to step over her, and as he does, she shies away, huddles back down into the quilt. He pulls the door to the living space open, and there is a rush of earth-smell, but then he’s gone. She can hear muffled voices at the other end of the greenhouses.  
  
He comes back a moment later, alone.  
  
“Who was it?”  
  
“It’s uh… it’s… social services or whoever. They want to talk to you.”

Brigitte’s eyes go wide, and she’s up and out of that bed so fast. “Why?” she asks, looking around like she’s trying to find an exit.  
  
“I don’t know, they’re probably just checking in? I don’t know.”  
  
“How’d they find me?”  
  
He shakes his head. “Look, I— there’s no reason… you’re okay here. I won’t let anything bad happen.”  
  
She looks too small in his t-shirt. It’s definitely his. He has the sudden thought that it’s going to look like they’re… _shit_.  
  
She seems to be thinking the same, or maybe she’s just finding more layers against herself and the outside world as she locates his hoodie, the one she wore yesterday hanging over the back of the desk chair and pulls it on. She puts on her shoes without socks and moves towards the door.  
  
With her hand on the handle, she hesitates, and looks back in his direction, but her eyes are on the floor. Before she can even say anything, he says “Yeah, I’m right behind you.”

“Hi, Brigitte?” the woman at the door asks. She’s small, Black, she’s got a brilliant smile that sparks through Brigitte like a discordant note. It feels strange that anyone should smile like that after everything, but it doesn’t seem fake or forced.  
  
“I’m Iris,” she says, “I’m from Justice for Children and Youth. You don’t have to be nervous, I just have some questions to ask you, okay?”  
  
“How’d you find me here?”  
  
“Your friends at school gave me the address of the County Regreening Programme. They said you know the owner.”  
  
Brigitte and Sam exchange looks. “My friends?” Brigitte asks.  
  
“Ben and Tim?” Iris says, like this should be obvious. Sam mumbles something that sounds like _jesus christ_ , but Iris doesn’t even acknowledge him. “I wonder if you and I could talk alone outside, Brigitte? There’s just a few things I want to ask you.”  
  
Brigitte looks back at Sam who looks just as unsure as she does. “Can’t you ask me here?”  
  
“Some of these documents are of a sensitive nature. It’s better if we’re alone.”  
  
“I don’t want to leave.”  
  
“You don’t have to go anywhere today. Honestly, it’s just some forms. We want to make sure you’re safe, that’s all. We need to register your address.”  
  
“Okay,” Brigitte says, softly, and Iris pushes open the greenhouse door, and Brigitte steps outside into the morning.  
  
Iris is very nice. She takes Brigitte up the road to Tim Hortons for coffee that Brigitte clings to for warmth, but can’t stomach, and they sit across from one another in the corner of the restaurant and Iris asks her questions and shows Brigitte her forms and Brigitte feels so, so lost.  
  
“You’ve been absent from school these last few days,” says Iris. “It will be much better for you if you start going back. Get back to normal, you know?”  
  
Brigitte doesn’t look up, but Iris seems to expect a response so she just manages a clipped “Yeah.”  
  
“And… well, have you spoken with your father?”  
  
“He’s out of the picture,” Brigitte tells her. Because that’s what they say on TV. He might as well not exist.  
  
“And have you decided where you’re going to live?”  
  
“I’m— I was going to go home.” She says it because it’s the only thing she can think of. It’s the only place she knows.  
  
Iris presses her lips together and then says “Your house is going to have to be reclaimed. It looks like no one will be making mortgage payments, so the house is going to be claimed by the loan company.”  
  
“But… all my stuff’s there.”  
  
“We can arrange for you to pick up your things, but… I’m sorry, there’s already a notice for your eviction. “I’ll arrange for us to go get your things, though, okay? We can set it up in a few days. In the mean time, you’re how old?”  
  
“Fifteen,” Brigitte says. She says it forcefully like she can somehow make it sound like eighteen if she tries hard enough.  
  
“Hm…”  
  
“What?”  
  
“And when’s your birthday? Ah, September… So you just turned fifteen.” Iris sighs. “If it was only going to be a couple of months, we could have started the process for social assistance, but you have to be sixteen for that.”  
  
“What does that mean?”  
  
“Well… if you have no fixed address.”  
  
“I’ll— I’ll get a job, I’ll get a place.”  
  
“And go to school?” She says it in that way adults do that makes Brigitte realize it’s not possible. “You’ll need social assistance to help you pay for your living costs. It will have to be approved by your employer. I’m afraid you don’t qualify for social assistance until you’re sixteen. A year from now.”  
  
“So what are you saying?”  
  
“Unless you have somewhere to go— a friend’s house maybe? You’ll have to be taken into a group home. Or foster care. That’s how we can make sure that you’re safe.”  
  
She drops Brigitte off at the greenhouses again, at her request, and as Brigitte steps out of the car, her arms filled with forms, Iris says “You don’t have to decide today, Brigitte, okay? Ask your friends from school if they can talk to their parents about you staying with them. We’ll be in touch, okay?”  
  
Brigitte slams the car door.

**SAM**

Sam meets her just inside the greenhouse doors. He takes one look at her face then shoots a look at Iris in her little Volkswagen Golf before he gently tugs Brigitte inside and shuts the door on the rest of the world.  
  
“She said they’re gonna send me to a group home,” Brigitte tells him, her voice so tight it makes Sam feel like he’s choking.  
  
“ _What_?”  
  
“That’s what she said. “I can’t get a place to live until I’m sixteen.”  
  
“Jesus— Brigitte. No, we won’t let that happen, okay?”  
  
She looks at him, frightened, too tense to be hopeful.  
  
“I won’t let that happen,” he tells her, more calmly. He reaches out, and she steps back. “Just— let me look at what she gave you, okay?” he says, taking the papers from her. “We’ll figure this out.”  
  
~  
  
They go to the library to use the computers, and Brigitte hovers at his shoulder for so long that he finally breaks and tells her that she’s freaking him out. He means she’s distracting him, but before he can apologize, she’s gone, wandering off down one of the rows of books until he can’t see her anymore. “Shit,” he says softly.  
  
In the end, they come out with more of a grasp on this thing than they had that morning. He makes Kraft Diner on the little stove because he doesn’t have anything else in the house that will feed both of them, and fills her in, where she sits on her makeshift bed on the floor.  
  
“She said I had to go back to school.”  
  
“Fuck, they can’t give you a break? You just lived through a crisis.”  
  
“Yeah,” She says. “Guess not.”  
  
She takes the bowl he hands to her and toys with the fork. He sits down on his own bed beside hers and starts to eat. His throat doesn’t hurt as much as yesterday, but his wrist still does. At least he can use it again. The fact that it hurts maybe means the monkshood is working.  
  
After a little while she says “I don’t know where to go.”  
  
“Why do you have to go anywhere?” Sam asks. She looks up at him with this skeptical look, so he barrels forward. “Look, I mean… it could be useful. We can make sure the cure’s working. It’s practical. It’s close to your school, shit, I could drop you off in the mornings and probably pick you up at the end of the day. Sometimes I work later but it’s like… whatever, you know?”  
  
“I can’t stay here,” Brigitte says.  
  
“Why not?”  
  
“Because it’s a year.”  
  
Sam takes a bite of macaroni and brings his fork hand out in a shrug. “I don’t mind. You have a better idea?”  
  
“You don’t want me around for that long.”  
  
“Says who?”  
  
She doesn’t have an answer for that either.  
  
“I like having you around,” Sam says. “You’re the only person I’ve ever met who actually gives a shit about science.”  
  
“Sounds like you haven’t met a lot of people.”  
  
“Haven’t felt the need to,” Sam says, and then, after a few moments. “Seriously, Brigitte. I don’t mind. But you’ve got to eat something, please. Don’t just push it around.”  
  
She puts a forkful of it into her mouth. “The orange freaks me out.”  
  
“Yeah,” Sam says. “Me too.”

**BRIGITTE**

They sort of wake up around the same time the next morning, and there’s this awkward moment where their eyes meet and it rattles her because he is sleepy and messy-haired and unguarded and she suspects that she is too, just for a second. She gets up quickly, and makes for the solitary refuge of the bathroom.  
  
There’s really not a lot she can do in there without seeming totally fucking weird. She pees and brushes her teeth and drags her dark mess of hair away from her shoulders and when she re-emerges Sam’s already up and making coffee. He’s also already smoking which turns her stomach a little. “Hey,” he says.  
  
“Hey.”  
  
“D’you like coffee?”  
  
“Sure.”  
  
“I uh… don’t have any sugar. There’s cream though.”  
  
“Thanks.”  
  
He hands her a cup and the cream, still cold from the fridge and then looks a little uncertain before he clears a space on the desk of books and bags of weed and sort of waves at it as though it’s a table set with fine china. She sits in the chair and watches him move around, smoking, making his own coffee. He fits here in this space, like she doesn’t. Her eyes are drawn to the wounds on his neck, and the way he still favours his right wrist, holding it close to his body without really even seeming to realize, and suddenly she can’t look at him anymore. Instead she studies the room. Books on plants, botany. There’s one called _The Green Witch_ and she reaches out and excavates it from the middle of an unsteady pile. It’s exactly like what it sounds like. She pages through it, and then looks up at him. “Do you believe in this stuff?”  
  
“You believe in werewolves.”  
  
“I didn’t always.” She looks at the black pillar candle on his desk, the one they used to cook the monkshood.  
  
“I can probably guarantee you that it’s not like what you’re thinking.”  
  
“Forget the Hollywood rules?” Brigitte asks.  
  
“Exactly.”  
  
She holds onto the book, traces the edges of it with her fingertips, her eyes wandering. “Did you carve all these pumpkins yourself?”  
  
They're all still sitting around after the Greenhouse Bash, and they all sort of look like blow-up dolls.  
  
“Yeah.” Sam says.  
  
“They kind of suck,” Brigitte tells him, and Sam takes a drag from his cigarette so that he doesn’t crack a smile.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title of this fic is from the Tragically Hip's song 'Bobcaygeon', which is a place in east-central Ontario (and also a great song, go check it out)
> 
> A lot of Sam and Brigitte's thoughts and dialogue is pulled directly from Karen Walton's earlier drafts of the script, because I really love them, and I want to add those elements to this story.


	2. Chapter 2

**BRIGITTE**

As promised, Iris shows up a few days later to bring Brigitte to her house to collect her things. They are accompanied by a person Brigitte doesn't know who seems to be the guy who's reclaiming the house so he can sell it. He scowls at her as he trails them from the front door (and it feels strange. She and Ginger always came through the side door). All of the blood is gone. The door to the pantry is missing. And Brigitte navigates the familiar walls of this place where she's spent all her life like it's a museum. She's afraid to touch anything. She moves around the upstairs like there is _anything_ at all she might want to take up there. She's afraid to go downstairs.  
   
"What's going to happen to everything?" she asks no one in particular.  
   
"Trash," says the agent. "Unless you got somewhere to take it. Or sell it." He looks at this watch.  
   
Finally, there's nothing else Bridgette can do, wasting time upstairs. She hasn't touched anything at all. She feels like the peace and quiet of this place is just a facade. Like if she touches it, the horror in the basement will come screaming up to claim her, explode everything out of existence. She's so afraid to go down those stairs.  
   
Iris is watching her like she wants to help her, but she's stayed quiet and unobtrusive, letting Brigitte do whatever she needs to do. The realtor guy keeps checking his goddamn watch. Sam's got this look on his face like he wants to kill him, and Brigitte is grateful, because she doesn't have the fucking stamina to drudge up that emotion herself.  
   
Finally she touches the doorknob to go down.

**SAM**

Their little party troops down the steps, and it doesn't smell the same. It smells like chemical cleaner. Clinical. And still, Sam feels like he's descending into the bowels of hell. All his nerves are set on edge, screaming at him _don't go down there._  
   
She stops at the edge of the corridor where she found Sam, and her breathing is all wrong, too fast. She meets Sam's eyes, and she looks lost, frightened.  
   
"Look," says the realtor. "Is this going to take much longer? I've got places to be."  
   
"Can you just actually give us a fucking second?" Sam asks. "She'll be up when she's done."  
   
Brigitte presses her hand against the wall and leans into it. She looks like she's going to pass out. The realtor glares daggers at Sam, and then turns and stomps up the stairs.  
   
"Brigitte," Iris says, "We can come back another time. It's okay."  
   
"No, I gotta get my stuff," she says. She pushes off the wall and falters, sways. Sam moves forward and catches hold of her sweater, just below the hood. She overbalances and has to reach out to steady herself against him. Her hand slides over the inside of his upper arm to the side of his chest just over his heart and he knows she must be able to feel how fast it's beating. He's fucking scared, too. He feels sick, but he can feel the way her shoulder blades shift beneath her— his sweater, beneath her skin, and it grounds him somehow. "You're good, we're good."  
   
She nods, steadier, and he steps away. The hallway looms before them both. Somewhere behind them, Sam knows Iris is watching, but he barely registers her. When Brigitte moves forward, there's a beat where Sam loses her. He steps to catch up and his palm slides over her back again, and she presses, like she needs it. And they walk like that, past the place Sam was lying just weeks ago, without looking, they walk past the place Brigitte hid beneath the stairs, and he's right at her back. And then she pushes open the door to their room, and they separate. Sam doesn't go in. He just stands in the doorway where she can see him. He watches her move to the end of the two twin beds in a daze. There are pictures on the walls and candles everywhere. There are clothes and books. They _lived_ here together. This was their world, and he feels like he's intruding, even just being in the doorway. Brigitte pulls an old sports bag from beneath her bed, and from it she extracts a pen light, a baseball bat, a calendar, bandages. She was prepared. Or at least she thought she was.  
   
Iris is giving them privacy. She's sitting at the foot of the stairs, going through some papers she's got, but Sam doesn't think she's really looking at them. She's just waiting.  
   
Now, Brigitte packs the bags with her clothes, just pulling them absently from the dresser drawers. Like they don't mean anything special to her. It is Ginger's clothes she's lingers over, moving them between her fingers as if to test the material. She packs some of those too, and Sam looks away, because it feels private somehow, but he doesn't want to leave her alone in here. He doesn't ever want her to feel abandoned again.  
   
Instead his eyes wander over the room. The beaded curtains catching somewhere light, the pictures on the walls. Suicide pictures. Brigitte hanging, Ginger trapped beneath a garage door. _Jesus_ he thinks, _what?_ Amongst these are pictures of just the two of them. Pictures of them smiling. Sam doesn't think he's ever actually seen Brigitte smile. Not like she is in this picture. "What about these pictures?" he asks.  
   
She looks up, looks around, helplessly. "I..."  
   
"You shouldn't leave them..."  
   
"I can't..."  
   
"You want me to do it? We'll put them in an envelope or something..."  
   
She nods, and so he moves forward, into this space which feels somehow both sacred and terrible. Like he doesn't belong here, but she's invited him in. Like a fucking privilege. He takes the pictures from the walls with impossible care, peeling the black tape and folding it down over the backs. He unsticks the photos creating two makeshift crosses from the walls over their beds while Brigitte disappears into the bathroom. They kind of meet in the middle. Sam's collected all the pictures in his hands like they are baby birds, and Brigitte grabs the nearest book from the bedside table and he drops them gently inside. She snaps it shut and pushes it into the sports bag. She pulls a coat on that is beige and too long for her and still not warm enough for the weather. She wraps a scarf around her neck and, last, she pulls bundles of dried monkshood down and slides them into her bag. Then she zips it up and meets his eyes. "Let's get out of here."

**SAM**

Eventually Sam realizes that the reason Brigitte's doing so well is because she's got so many things to distract her. And in retrospect, he shouldn't have assumed she was doing well at all. Her sister just died, her mother's in prison, and her father's a cunt, and she hasn't cried. Not really. And sure, maybe it's only been a couple of days, but it never actually occurs to him that she's not getting closure on any of this. Not until her armour fractures right down the centre.  
   
It's a Tuesday, and Brigitte has been absent from school for nearly a week, Sam's spent half of that time reading about what happens to kids whose parents disappear, and what the province is going to do about it. She can miss nineteen days of school legally. The school year's just started, and they're already creeping into November. The air outside smells like snow, but none has fallen yet. That big Ontario sky is just oppressively, endlessly grey.  
   
He's up and eating cereal by the time she emerges from the bathroom. And he doesn’t let himself think too hard about the fact that she’s got her clothes from home, now, but she’s still holding his hoodie captive. He can’t really say he minds.  
  
 He'd watched her get up, but they never really speak in those first few moments. That's something he's gotten used to. She sits down at the edge of the table, so they're each occupying one edge of the corner. This is their dinner table now, all the books and drugs and mail he hasn't opened yet are scattered and stacked over the rest of the surface.  
   
"Hey... so I was thinking... I think you should go back to school."  
   
She gives him this look.  
   
"What?" he asks her.  
   
"Why? So everyone can have first row seats to the freak show?"  
   
"Because it's illegal not to. Besides, I have to get back to work."  
   
"Well I'm not stopping you. I don't need to be babysat."  
   
"No, I know that, Brigitte. Fuck. Look, I just... because people are fucking breathing down our necks, and I don't want... all it's gonna take is one fucking slip up and they're going to find a reason to put you in the fucking system."  
   
"I can't go back there," Brigitte says, and she's all wild-eyed and shaking. All of a sudden she's so pale, and so shaky that he goes very still. She's holding something back like she might vomit. "Do you know what they'll do to me back there after Trina?"  
   
"They're just fucking high school idiots—" Sam begins, but Brigitte heads him off, voice cut with this rising panic over his, "I _can't_ go back there without Ginger. They'll fucking tear me apart!" And then suddenly she's sobbing. It comes over her so fast that she practically chokes on it.  
   
Sam reels back, startled and she goes further off the rails, just dissolves into it. And it's not a temper tantrum, it's not a teenager throwing a fit. And Sam knows, he remembers, of course, that it never is. It's never just a tantrum. That's just a word adults put on things when they don't understand. And the sounds she's making, it's like she's being ripped apart from the inside out. She's _hurt_ , and he's kicking himself for not realizing sooner that it wasn't right that she seemed so okay.  
   
"Oh, shit, Brigitte, Brigitte," He reaches for her but she skitters up and away so fast he can't even brush his fingers against her. He has no idea what he'd do anyway. He doesn't think he's ever actually touched her beyond tugging at her clothes, beyond the most casual brush as they passed one another. But he can't just stand here and listen to her cry like that.  
   
"Okay. Okay, I hear you," he says, softly, but he doesn't even know if she's hearing him. He puts his hands into his pockets, takes them out. She's got her face covered by her hair and her hands are covered by the sleeves of his hoodie. So she's completely hidden. She's hiding from him, from everyone. She has no one else to turn to.  
   
"Okay," he says, and turns away to get a glass of water. When he comes back, he takes one of her hands and pulls it away from her face, pushes the glass into it. She just holds it automatically, but she can't quite hide from him anymore, with the glass in her hands. She turns her body away and he can see the narrowness of her back, how she's about to break beneath the weight of all of this. It never should have happened to her.  
   
He reaches out and turns her back. "Listen, look at me. I hear you."  
   
And then there's nothing to do but let her cry. He leads her to his bed by the sleeve and sits her down and takes the water from her because she's not going to drink it. And then he just sits down beside her and waits it out.  
   
When she's done, her breath still shaking hard with every inhale, she sort of falls against the pillows sideways, and exhaustion settles along her limbs in a way that's sort of wrong. She's too thin, Sam notices, not exactly for the first time, and she curls one leg up on the bed, but the other dangles down to the floor, posture sort of wrong, like she's a doll just cast down somewhere. He wants to push the hair away from her face where it's sticking to her cheeks and to her lips. She wipes her nose against the sleeve of his sweater and he doesn't care.  
   
"I can't do this without her," Brigitte whispers to no one, or maybe to him, but she's staring, glassy-eyed, into the middle distance, and it doesn't take him too long to realize that she means 'life'.  
   
Sam works around the greenhouses like he has been this past week. He's supposed to be landscaping, but he calls from the landline to tell his contracts that he's sick and he'll make it up to them. He takes the financial cut and prepares himself for a few weeks of alphagetti for supper and it doesn't matter. Brigitte sleeps on his bed all day, and he can't coax her to eat or drink anything at all.  
   
That night, he sleeps on her bed on the floor, and leaves her on his bed. In the morning she's only moved enough to face the wall, still not under the covers, even though the November chill's starting to creep in. He gets up and puts the heavy quilt from the floor over her. She doesn't open her eyes, but he knows she's awake.  
   
"Morning," he says. It's barely a whisper.  
   
Breaking their unspoken rule of no speaking when they first wake up.  
   
She doesn't respond.  
   
He finally breaks that evening. She's been in bed for two days, only getting up to go to the bathroom. Once he hears her retching, and he knows that feeling. Trying to get the pain out without knowing where it sits. She's not going to be able to rid herself of it that way.  
   
Around six o'clock, sun setting violently red outside, he touches her on the shoulder and leans over her a little to see her face, so that he can speak soft enough to take away the command. "Brigitte, you gotta get up. You have to eat something."  
   
"I'm not hungry."  
   
"For me. Please."  
   
Sam draws away. She hadn't tensed beneath his fingers, but she shifts her should back as if shaking off some residual sensation, then she sits up to face him.  
   
"Hey," he says, quietly. She glances up at him, all haunted eyes, but she looks. She holds his gaze. "Hey," she whispers. And Sam thinks about... creature comforts. Kissing her forehead, hugging her until she felt some of that weight on her shoulders disappear, but he doesn't know how, because she’d never let him.  
   
Instead he says "I'm sorry. That we couldn't save her."  
   
She swallows, and looks away. "You have no idea."  
   
"You're right, I don't." But Sam's never felt that close to someone. To anyone. Except he doesn't mind having Brigitte around. She's slipped into his life, into his space like a ripple of water on a lake. Seamlessly. And then everything imploded. But he likes having her here. That's more than can be said for anybody else he knows.  
   
"Thanks," she says, softly.  
   
"What for?"  
   
"For not pretending you get it. Sorry about before." About crying, about breaking down.  
   
"Don't be.” He shrugs a shoulder. "Like I said, we'll figure it out. I swear."  
   
Like maybe if he keeps making promises to her, she'll stick around.

**BRIGITTE**

Iris returns with more forms and a worried expression. “So you’re still not going to school?” she asks Brigitte.  
  
“She just went through a huge fucking ordeal,” Sam says from where’s smoking in the doorway to the greenhouses proper. Brigitte is standing a few feet away with Iris on the grass outside. “Can’t they cut her a break?”  
  
“I think a psychologist would be more beneficial than a break,” Iris says without looking up at him. And Brigitte sees something there, in Iris. How Iris can’t look at Sam, because when she does, she gets nervous, flushed. Brigitte’s sort of fascinated by the way she keeps acing her professional manner anyway, but more than that she’s fascinated by the fact that this is a thing that happens to other people so frequently that they can just power through it. On top of that, Brigitte doesn’t think Sam notices at all.  
  
“I don’t want to see a psychologist,” she says, a beat too late.  
  
“There are a lot of red flags in your file indicating that it could be helpful to you.”  
  
“You created my file,” Brigitte reminds her. “And I’m doing fine, thanks.”  
  
“Well do you have anyone to talk to? Do you have a support system?”  
  
Thrown under the bus like this, Brigitte wraps her arms around herself a little tighter, Sam’s hoodie — smelling like laundry and dryer heat now, and not like him anymore — pulls across her back. “I’ve got Sam.” And she feels this horrible heat creep across her face and down her neck and she ducks her head and presses her fingers to her mouth in the place of the cigarette she wishes she had, but Sam doesn’t let her smoke in front of the social worker. _'Doesn’t look good for business.'_  
  
Behind her, Sam’s gone still. He’s not fidgeting like he usually is, and that makes it so much worse. Iris looks between them. “Okay guys,” Iris says, and her professional voice dips. Brigitte thinks it’s on purpose. Beneath it, she’s got an accent that’s both harder and warmer and Brigitte’s eyes snap back to her face. “My concern with Brigitte’s absence from school is that it’s going to look like she isn’t living in a stable environment.”  
  
“I’m—” Brigitte begins, but Iris holds up a hand and Brigitte goes quiet.  
  
“A stable environment sends kids to school. It’s a regular schedule, and that is what will help her right now. If she’s in school, she’s off the radar a little bit more, she’s going to have less visits from people like me, and if she isn’t going,” she says, directly to Sam, now, and her flushed cheeks are nowhere to be found. For the first time, Brigitte thinks that someone’s choosing her over a guy, and it’s a stranger. “If she isn’t going, it’s going to show up, and she _will_ be taken away.”  
  
“If you honestly think a fucking group home is going to give her a ‘stable environment’—” Sam begins.  
  
“Hey. I’m speaking,” Iris says. “If _you_ think I don’t know you’ve got a grow-op in there, or that you’ve had a questionable relationship with a minor in the past, you’ve got another thing coming. So you tell me how that’s better than a group home, hm? How that’s going to hold up under questioning. Now listen. I’m good at my job, and I’ve dealt with a lot of cases. If you don’t want her to end up in a place like that, you better start making changes, fast.”  
  
Sam’s holding his cigarette just inches from his mouth, and it’s burned dangerously low. His eyes are fixed on Iris. He swallows and then asks, quiet, “If you’re so good at your job, then why are you on our side?”  
  
“Because Brigitte will do better with someone she trusts. And if that’s you, then you’d better pull your socks up. This could turn on a dime, Mr. McDonald, do you understand that?”  
  
Sam shoots a look at Brigitte, but he only catches her eyes for a second. She’s collapsing in on herself, shifting her weight back on her shoes enough so that her legs and spine have to compensate. She shifts her weight back, swaying a little because she wants away from this moment so badly she wishes she could completely dissolve.  
  
“That school’s a fucking nightmare,” Sam says. “Those kids are going to eviscerate her over something she didn’t even do.”  
  
“There are other schools in this area.”  
  
“Who the fuck is going to register for that? Her parents are— you make this system goddamn _impossible_ on purpose.”  
  
“All she needs is a legal guardian. With a legal guardian, and Brigitte back in school, things will calm down.”  
  
So she’s fucked. Brigitte knows it. Henry’s never coming back for her, her parents' families are alienated on both sides, and she doesn’t have any aunts or uncles.  
  
“Okay, fine,” Sam says, butting his cigarette out against the side of the greenhouse and coming closer. “How do I do that?” Brigitte looks over at him like he’s lost his fucking mind.  
  
“Theres’s an application you’ll have to fill out. And you’ll need a police record check.”  
  
“Sam—” Brigitte begins, but Sam’s already writing this down on the inside of his cigarette pack with the pen Iris has handed him.

**SAM**

Brigitte says his name once, but Sam hasn’t even finished writing down the name of the place he’s supposed to take all this shit to when she turns and goes inside, letting the door shut too hard behind her. The staccato rattle of it mimics the way his heart is slamming into his chest, because he doesn’t know if this is right, but he doesn’t know what the fuck else to do. If she’s taken, if they put her in a group home or in foster care, he’s never going to fucking see her again. Ontario’s a huge place. She’ll end up in Kingston or Brampton or somewhere, or worse, Toronto, and she’ll just disappear, forever.  
  
And he can’t lose her.  
  
Once Brigitte’s gone Sam stares down at the scrawled note on the inside of his cigarette pack and sniffs hard, before folding it up again, handing Iris’s pen back. “Do me a favour and tell me how I’m not going to fuck this up?”  
  
“I’ve already done you a favour,” Iris tells him. “And you’re right. The system is impossible; and kids fall through the cracks _all the time_. But no one’s gonna do you favours anymore. You have to do _her_ a favour now.”  
  
Sam looks back towards the greenhouse, where Brigitte disappeared, pushes his hands into his pockets.  
  
“I was that girl in there, once,” Iris says. “And I lost the only person who ever pulled through for me, and I shouldn’t have, but there was nothing either one of us could do. So I’m giving you a choice. If you don’t want to fuck it up? Don’t.”  
  
Sam meets her eyes.  
  
“Okay.”

**BRIGITTE**

When Sam comes back inside, Brigitte is right there at the door. She startles him a little when he comes in. “What the fuck are you doing?”  
  
“I’m changing your school,” Sam says.  
  
“You _can’t_.”  
  
“Why not? I thought that was what you wanted.” Sam fights in this weird way. Like he really doesn’t want to be fighting. He’s almost turned away from her, chest and shoulders slightly askew, eyes more uncertain than hard. It’s like he’s pissed, but he’s putting that aggression somewhere else, and she realizes that he doesn’t scare her when he’s mad the way that other guys do.  
  
“I don’t want you to be my _legal guardian_ ,” She tells him, and she can feel herself practically shaking with anger, because even though she isn’t afraid of _Sam_ , all this feels like it’s slipping out of her control, and that’s fucking terrifying. “I don’t need a fucking _parent_ , I never have.”  
  
“Well you need fucking somebody to sign forms for you. I dunno if you’ve noticed, but no one else is stepping up.”  
  
Sam looks immediately sorry, but Brigitte’s stopped cold. She has to actually collect herself, something like shame or fury searing cold down her arms. That hurt. But she’s used to words making her feel like she’s been smacked. “Thanks,” she says, bitterly sarcastic.  
  
“Fuck… I didn’t mean it like that.”  
  
“How did you mean it then?”  
  
“I just meant— look, I’m _trying to help_!”  
  
“Well maybe I don’t need your help.” She hears how she says it. How she sounds. It comes out like a snarl, all bitch and snark. She doesn’t want to be like this, but it’s like she can’t stop herself.  
  
Sam narrows his eyes at her. He’s already fumbling for his cigarettes. Great, she’s going to turn him into a chain-smoker. And be responsible for his lung-cancer, and then someone else’s blood will be on her hands.  
  
As though Sam’s hasn’t been already.  
  
“Why’re you fighting this, Brigitte?” he asks. “It’s just a stupid piece of paper.”  
  
“I,” Brigitte says, with quiet ferocity, “am not your property. I’m not your _charge_. If I need something done, I’ll do it myself.”  
  
“Then no offence? But what the fuck are you still doing here?” Sam asks her.  
  
And she doesn’t have an answer for that.  
  
Sam doesn’t walk away from her. He’s got his eyes on the ground, maybe waiting, maybe not. She’s trying desperately to think of something to say, but then he smiles and glances up at her. “Also, what fucking year is it, Jane Eyre? My _charge_?”  
  
Brigitte, feeling foolish, but also a little relieved, rolls her eyes. “Shut up,”  
  
“Whatever, Jane,” Sam says, not totally dismissive, moving away towards the table.  
  
“Anyway, Jane was a governess, Adèle was her charge.”  
  
Sam actually laughs. “What?” he asks.  
  
“We had to read it for class.”  
  
Sam exhales smoke thorough his nose, pressing his lips together to stop the smile, meets her eyes again. “Brigitte Fitzgerald,” he says in this way that makes her heart skip in a way she wishes it wouldn’t because it reminds her of fear, but isn’t that. “Would you like to come to city hall, to get these fucking stupid applications filled out with me, so that you and me can finally get some peace and quiet from all this legal shit?”  
  
She swallows, her eyes searching his. “You swear that’s all it is?”  
  
“What else would it be?”  
  
“Never mind, forget it.”  
  
“Brigitte, come on. Talk to me.”  
  
“I’m not doing what you say,” she tells him. “Just because the form says I have to.”  
  
“That's not what the form says. And besides, when have you ever?” Sam asks.  
  
Brigitte thinks _Maybe I should have_ , but instead of saying that, she just shrugs and says “Okay.” and follows him out to the truck.

**SAM**

On the way back home, Brigitte’s quiet. Nothing’s done yet, it was just applications. It’s almost evening, because they’d spent all morning waiting at city hall, and then all afternoon waiting at the police station to get the police check. Brigitte hasn’t said much. She’s totally in her own head. Maybe they’re both pretending they’re not scared. He keeps getting stuck on the fact that he’s twenty-three years old, and mostly a fuck-up, and how he can’t take care of himself let alone anyone else. But then he also keeps thinking that — legal shit or not — he’d do fucking anything to protect her. Even after what happened. Unconsciously, he fingers the scars at the side of his throat.  
  
Brigitte’s leaning against the window, watching the suburb drift past. It’s like winter forgot it was supposed to be doing something, because all the warm browns and oranges from autumn have almost completely faded — everything’s all dark and grey, skeleton branches shivering in the wind. She needs a better coat than the one she's got on. He’s thinking about that when she sits up a little straighter and asks “Is that police check gonna come back clean?”  
  
“What do you mean?”  
  
“Trina…”  
  
“There was never anything… no one called the _police_ , jesus.”  
  
“What was all that about, anyway?” Brigitte asks. “Iris said you had a ‘questionable relationship’.”  
  
Sam takes a deep breath. “Trina was a mistake.”  
  
“That’s not an answer.”  
  
Sam almost rolls his eyes, but catches himself and checks the rearview instead. The streets are dead at this time of day. Just old people and housewives. Everyone else is at school or at work, just like he and Brigitte should be. “Okay, Trina… I met her at a party where I was dealing. All right? It was some college thing out past the edge of town, you know? I thought she was older, I don’t know. It sort of turned into a thing, I saw her for a while, but it got weird fast. You know, just… we didn’t really have much in common…” Sam sighs.  
  
“Did you fuck her while she was drunk?”  
  
He shoots her this quick, disgusted look. “She wasn’t _drunk_ at that party,” Sam says. “Alcohol slows muscle recovery. Trina ran, she did field hockey. It’s bad for your… skin.”  
  
“So she does drugs instead?”  
  
“Who says she does drugs?”  
  
He can feel Brigitte’s eyes on him, and realizes he sounds too defensive. Maybe he is defensive, he doesn’t know.  
  
“I just figured—” Brigitte begins.  
  
“Why else would she talk to me, right?” Sam asks.  
  
“…I didn’t mean it like that.”  
  
“Probably for the same reason you did,” says Sam. “She needed help.”  
  
“With _what_?” Brigitte asks. “She was perfect.”  
  
“No she wasn’t. And she knew it. ‘Cept the thing was, Brigitte, she thought she needed someone to want her in order to be anything other than a waste of space… and so did I.”

And that was their common ground.  
  
“You’re not a waste of space,” Brigitte says, voice carefully calculated to be even.  
  
Sam just shrugs. “Neither was Trina. Only the thing was, was that when _I_ figured out I was using her, I ended things. But she… I dunno. I dunno. I think maybe she actually liked me a lot.”  
  
“Oh.”  
  
They drive in silence for a while, and then finally Brigitte says. “I promise what happened to her was an accident.”  
  
“I know.”  
  
“Did you like her back?”  
  
“…Yeah,” Sam says. “For a little while. At least I thought I did. She’s not… she wasn’t a bad person, Brigitte. Anyway, I shouldn’t’ve… I shouldn’t have done it in the first place. Or — I don’t know — it’s all… messed up.”  
  
“Sorry,” Brigitte whispers.  
  
“Yeah. Me too.”

**BRIGITTE**

“Count to one hundred…”  
  
_Ginger?_ Brigitte thinks. Because it’s her voice. It’s been so long since Brigitte has heard her voice.

“Bee. Count to one hundred. Alright? One... two...”  
  
“Three,” Brigitte whispers. Where is she? “Four.” It’s all dark. “Five. Six. Seven... Ginge, where are you?” There is no response from the darkness. “Eight—”  
  
_“You always do whatever she wants you to, you always have.”_  
  
“Twenty-seven, twenty-eight—”  
  
_“Brigitte, you are not connected at her wrist.”_  
  
Someone’s got her wrist in their hand, and Brigitte wiggles her fingers because the grip is tight. “Fifty-four. Fifty-five...”  
  
And Brigitte wants Ginger so badly. She wants the smell of her unwashed hair and the feeling of her arms around her and her pout when she didn’t get her way. “Ginger? Where are you? ...Eighty-six...”  
  
She hurts. Like sick. There’s an aching hollowness in her gut, leeching into her legs so she is certain she won’t be able to run.  
  
“Run,” someone whispers. It’s not Ginger’s voice, or Mom’s. Brigitte thinks it might be her own.  
  
“Run!” It hisses, right into her ear, all urgency, and the grip around her wrist is loosened. And Brigitte is suddenly terrified.  
  
“Ninety. Ginger, please— ninety-one... ninety-two... what happens when I get to a hundred?”  
  
No answer. And Brigitte feels like she wants to throw up from fear. It’s crept up on her like twilight. Something is very very wrong, but she cannot stop counting, like she’s been possessed. “Ninety-seven—”

“Count to one hundred—”

“Ninety-eight—”

“And when you do—”

“Ninety-nine—”

“I’ll be back.”  
  
It happens so fast. Within the darkness, Brigitte suddenly makes out something hanging, spider-like, from the ceiling. Before she can quite make it out, it leaps from the corner of the ceiling down onto her. Brigitte catches a flash of red hair and white teeth and Ginger’s eyes, but wrong, crazed. She screams.

**SAM**

Brigitte’s scream tears through his sleep and Sam bolts up, lost, thrown right back into that terrible basement corridor. It felt like being in the belly of a giant beast, all those unfinished beams. Like a gruesome fairy-tale, that world down there. But now everything is dark and Brigitte is _screaming_ for her life.

He gropes for the bedside lamp and it blinds him as it flicks on. Brigitte, next to him on the floor is struggling against the blankets. Sam shouts her name and he’s down on the floor with her, over her. He doesn’t want to pin her down, so he just grasps her shoulders and shakes her gently, saying _Brigitte, Brigitte!_

Her eyes lock on him, and something is slipping back in them as her pupils undilate. She recognizes him, but he doesn’t get a second to calm her down before her eyes are darting all around the room, up to the ceiling. It’s unnerving. He presses closer to her like something might catch him from behind, like she can protect him. “Hey hey hey— were you dreaming? Hey...”  
  
She’s catching her breath, shaking violently. “I dunno—“ she presses her hands to her face and they come away wet. She looks at it like she thinks it might be blood, but it’s not. Just tears. But she’s calmer now, and Sam shifts from where he’s crouched over her legs, lets go of her arms. He sits back against the side of his own bed, his eyes on her.  
  
For a moment or two, it’s just their breathing. She wipes at her face, perfunctory, with her hands. Minutes pass.  
  
“Hey,” Sam says. “ Are you cold?” She’s still practically vibrating.  
  
“I dunno,” she says. “I don’t feel good.”  
  
“Oh, really? Um, okay, yeah, I’ll get you some water.” Jesus he's so unhelpful.

He does and then huddles right back down on the floor with her again. She drinks from it and the glass rattles against her teeth. She spills some into her blankets before she sets it down.

“Here... come up here,” Sam says, hoisting himself up by his hands onto the low bed. He reaches down to help her, and she actually takes his hands and comes up, sitting beside him. “Get under the covers. Here. It’s warmer than the floor.”  
  
She huddles right back against the wall, blankets pulled up high and clutched in her hand which mostly obscures the lower half of her face. Sam grabs one of the quilts from her bed and drapes it over her. “You’re okay,” he tells her.  
  
“Where’re you going to sleep?”  
  
“The floor’s okay.”  
  
Brigitte’s quiet. She ducks her face down and murmurs something lost in the folds of the blanket, in the cracks between her thin fingers.  
  
“What?”  
  
“Could you like, just stay?”

Sam goes still, startled. “Uh, yeah,” he says. “Sure.”

He climbs back onto the bed, gets under some but not all of the blankets, leaves the thin sheet between the two of them. Space is tight, but neither of them are very big. He reaches for the lamp and she says “can you leave it on, please?”  
  
“Yeah. No, yeah, sure.”

He doesn’t let himself fall asleep until she does.

**BRIGITTE**

The letter confirming or denying Sam’s guardianship arrives on Ginger’s birthday. Neither of them opens it. It sits there amongst bills and pizza flyers and coupons for a video store. They are both quiet that morning. Sam eventually leaves to go to work. He hasn’t pressed her about school, but she knows it’s bothering him. She’s intuitive like that. And also, he keeps trying to bring it up and then doesn’t. She’s really pushing her allotted absences and, honestly, it kind of astounds her that anyone would notice her absence at all. That anyone has been noticing them. But maybe when your mother’s considered a murderer, it all kind of piles up.  
  
Brigitte does what she normally does when Sam leaves for work, after the Country Greenhouse van pulls out of the front yard. She reads, she moves through the plants in the greenhouse proper, touching them gently, breathing in the simple smell of green, growing things, and she wonders how she was ever so disgusted by life when it can be so… intricate. It’s peaceful here. Normally she feels safe, but today…  
  
Brigitte doesn’t go out to the greenhouse this morning after Sam leaves. Instead she eyes the sealed letter from city hall and, finally, she rips it open. It might not be her name on the envelope, but it’s her life inside of it.  
  
_…letter is to confirm that the applicant, Samuel Jacob McDonald is the legal guardian of the minor, Brigitte Josephine Fitzgerald until further arrangements are made, or the minor reaches 18 years of age…_  
  
And Brigitte thinks about how she never really thought she’d see eighteen, but she didn’t really think she’d kill herself either, and suddenly the rest of her life stretches out blank and lonely before her, because she never planned for anything but Ginger.  
  
And now she feels like a traitor. Living with a guy? Sleeping in his bed, eating his food. She’s totally dependant here. And she can’t imagine Sam sticking it out for three more years. Hasn’t Ginger always told her she was a drag? A total wet blanket. She drops the form onto the table and pulls on her coat — the only one she brought from their house, the beige one. She does’t know where she’s going. Maybe she’s just walking, maybe she’s running away. She doesn’t bring anything though. Maybe she’s just hoping to disappear, completely. She can’t put this on Sam. Put his life on hold for years. She can’t betray Ginger like this, not after everything. Brigitte makes for the woods, as though they don’t terrify her, after that night at the park.

**SAM**

When Sam gets home, the lights are off. It’s been drizzling since the afternoon, and the rattling against his windshield tells him it’s turning to freezing rain. Great. Barely November, and winter’s already got a chokehold.  
  
He heads inside, but it’s weirdly quiet. There’s no one here. Still, he calls for Brigitte anyway, always half-scared he’s going to find her laid out like one of those polaroids, only this time it won’t be for art. He doesn’t. All her stuff’s still here. _Okay_ , Sam thinks. _Don’t freak out. Don’t…_

**BRIGITTE**

It’s sleeting as she makes her way through the forest, stumbling through underbrush, pushing her way past low-hanging branches. She doesn’t know where she’s going, but finally she’s too tired and too cold to make it any further. Her shoes are soaked through, and the sleet’s soaked through her coat even with the cover of the trees overhead. She stumbles into a tiny clearing, stops, and her panting turns into something that hurts more, that tumbles shaking and ragged from her chest. “I don’t know what to do,” she tells the woods, whatever harmless, suburban forest-animals are listening. She tells Ginger. And she thinks _you left, you_ left.  
  
Brigitte drops to her knees, claws at the half-frozen earth like she might find something there — an answer, a place to lay where she can finally stop hurting, forever. And she screams until her throat is raw.  
  
Brigitte has always thought that dying in the snow would be one of the most peaceful ways to go. She lies on her back in shallow imprint of the earth she’s turned up, her nails blackened and split, facing the sky. She shuts her eyes tight against the onslaught, and lets the freezing rain cut at her face, lets it take away the heat of her tears.

**SAM**

It’s almost eleven o’clock at night, and Sam pretty sure Brigitte’s not coming back. He’s seen the guardianship letter, wonders if she finally decided to blow, because this isn’t what she wants. He can’t fucking blame her, but he’s not just going to… what? What? If he finds her, and drags her back here, what will that do? How will that help? Sam knows he can barely take care of himself, how the fuck is he supposed to help Brigitte? This isn’t monkshood anymore, this isn’t fucking lycanthropes, this is him and Brigitte and everything they’ve lost, and Sam doesn’t know how to fix that.  
  
He fingers his keys where they are sitting on the table, debating, and then he snatches them up, grabs his coat and makes for the door. He’s got to at least try. Brigitte’s had enough people who didn’t try. If he finds her, then they can figure this out. Jesus, he’s on her _side_ , doesn’t she know that?  
  
He reaches the door and pulls it open just in time to see her freeze up in the front yard like a deer in headlights. “Brigitte.”  
  
“Hey,” she says, and her voice sounds wrecked. He crosses to her, the rain biting at his skin.  
  
“What the fuck? Come inside.”  
  
“I went for a walk,” she says as they step back into his room.  
  
“Yeah, I can see that. Jesus, you’re soaked, get your coat off.” He pulls away from her to turn the heat to full blast. When he turns back to her, in the light, he can see that she’s really a mess. She’s shivering and her hair is dripping onto the floor. Her fingers, where she’s struggling with her coat buttons, are almost black.  
  
“Your hands.”  
  
“It’s okay.”  
  
He watches her struggling with her coat, but her fingers are too stiff to use. “What were you doing?”  
  
“I went out to the woods.”  
  
“Okay. Why?”  
  
She doesn’t answer. Instead she huffs out a frustrated breath, pulling at the folds of her coat as if to snap the button right off.  
  
“Here… here, c’mere,” Sam says, moving closer to her. She lets him brush her hands away, leaning back from him ever so slightly. He unbuttons her coat and then reaches for her hands. “Look, fuck. You’re bleeding, I’m gonna get a cloth.”  
  
“I’m fine.”  
  
He’s not listening. He gets a cloth anyway and comes out to her hanging the coat up clumsily. “Hey, just—let me see.” He reaches out and takes one of her hands and hisses softly, because they’re like ice, especially after the hot water of the tap and the warmth of the cloth in his hands.  
  
“I don’t need you to look after me.”  
  
“What if I want to?”  
  
He meets her eyes, and he can see that she’s been crying. She holds his gaze anyway, and he presses the cloth to her palm, wiping at the dirt gently. She drops her eyes. He’s careful of her fingers, because they feel impossibly thin and fragile, but they are also all cut around her fingernails. Some of them are split down to the quick, and he’s careful not to catch the edges of them on the cloth.  
  
Her hair is still dripping. It lands cold and wet on his hands and wrists. “You should change,” he tells her as he finishes. It’s the best he can do. Her nails are still blackened half-moons, but he’s not about to hurt her trying to clean it out. “Have a hot shower or something.”  
  
She slides her hands into her sleeves, clasping her own wrists like a monk or something and nods at the floor. Sam hesitates, then says “I’m gonna make coffee.”  
  
“It’s her birthday,” Brigitte says, very softly. He almost doesn’t hear her, and when he does, it’s more putting the pieces together than anything.  
  
“Oh,” he says, and then he’s at a loss. Everything he can possibly say feels so empty. He imagines she must feel so much worse. She moves, without waiting for a response, and the kettle starts rattling on the stove as it heats up. Sam wishes it wouldn’t. She gathers some clothes and shuts herself in the bathroom. She doesn’t turn the shower on, but the tap runs, and she emerges a little later with her hands cleaner, nails clipped down as far as she can cut them to prevent them from splitting more. She takes the cup of coffee he’s left out for her and sits beside him at the table in silence for a while.

**BRIGITTE**

There was no answer, out there in the woods. At least not one Brigitte knew how to hear. And in the end, lying there in the forest, thinking about dying, she realized that what she wanted most was the quiet comfort of this place. The smell of weed and soil and growing things, and Sam’s cigarettes. And maybe she wanted Sam’s hands on hers because he touches her with such purpose. And maybe she wanted Sam’s voice saying _‘c’mere,’_ softly to her. Saying _'what if I want to?'_.  
  
Maybe she is a traitor. But Ginger betrayed her first.  
  
And Brigitte feels both awful and vindicated for thinking that way.  
  
When Sam finally gets up to start making the bed on the floor he tells her to take his, just until she gets warmer, and Brigitte musters up every ounce of courage she has and still only manages something a little louder than a whisper: “What if you don’t? Make the bed down there?”  
  
Sam wets his lips, uncertain, and the way he looks at her makes her think that this isn’t, can’t be, just one sided on her part. But she doesn’t know what she wants, so does that make her a tease? She doesn’t know. She just wants… someone, someone safe. And Sam is familiar, he doesn’t scare her like the other guys do — like Jason, like Tim…  
  
Maybe everything everyone does has ulterior motives, but for right now, Brigitte wants things to be simple.  
  
“You want to share again?” Sam asks, and she relaxes, because just like that, he makes ‘again’ mean ‘just like last night’ — nothing expected, nothing too close. Just a repeat of the night before, hopefully without the bad dreams.  
  
She nods and Sam turns and drops the heavy quilt onto the bed instead.  
  
He lets her take the side by the wall and when he climbs in next to her he doesn’t touch her. “Light on or off?”  
  
“Off.”  
  
She listens to his breathing in the darkness, and she doesn’t think either of them sleep for a long while.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Brigitte's middle name was chosen because of a source I found showing that Pamela's stationary (the one Brigitte writes Ginger's fake sick-note on) says "Pamela Joanne Fitzgerald" at the top. Since Ginger's middle name is Anne ("Ginger Anne!" at the table, when the girls are talking about spondylitis) I just figured I'd take make Brigitte's Josephine so that both girls' middle names are sort of derived from Pamela's. Sam's I just chose from a list of popular baby names around his birth year which, according to the script, is probably around 1976 assuming, as I do, that the film takes place in the year 2000 when it was released).


	3. Chapter 3

**SAM**

Sam wakes up to the slow grey creep of dawn, and the impending sense that something is wrong. He listens, first, like he might hear some great, hulking beast breathing in the dim. Like he might hear strong, dark claws on the linoleum. But he doesn’t. He just hears Brigitte’s breathing, and his own. He doesn’t know what exactly makes him reach out to her. She’s asleep, and they aren’t— they don’t— touch. Not really. Not supposed to.  
  
The thin sheet separating them is— cold, he thinks, but no, it’s damp. And she, when he finds her arm beneath it, she is hot as a brand and Sam hisses. “Brigitte,” he says, sitting up. He reaches for the lamp and flicks it on. She winces in the light and turns her face into the pillow. “Brigitte,” Sam says again, “Get up.”  
  
"S'wrong?”  
  
Her voice is heavy, too soft. He reaches out and drags the sheet down and she’s looking at him again, and her eyes are almost inhuman they are so dark, almost glittering in her face. Her hair sticks to her skin in tendrils and he’s struck by her, a moment, because she looks like a creature from a fairy tale — the old kind — she’s elfin, unearthly, and he’s recalling all these stories about things coming in off of the moors, out of the mists of the forest-edge. Her cheeks are flooded with heat and colour but she’s not altogether there in her eyes. “Jesus,” he breathes and reaches out to press his palm to her forehead and she doesn’t flinch back. Her eyes just flutter shut beneath his touch.  
  
The fever is so high. He can tell by touch alone and for a moment he’s paralyzed with uncertainty. “You’ve got to— you’re sick, here, sit here,” he touches the edge of the bed as he gets out of it. “We’ve got to bring your fever down.”  
  
She does what she’s told, without a word and he goes to get a damp cloth. Another one. The one covered in dirt is still drying on the edge of the bathroom sink. “Here,” he says, coming back to her. She’s clinging to the edge of the mattress like she’s holding herself up, so he kneels down in front of her and pushes her hair back from her face so he can run the cold cloth over her skin. She pulls in a startled breath at how cold it feels.  
  
“You shouldn’t have stayed out in that rain,” he says, and immediately feels like it was a mistake to blame her. This isn’t her fault.  
  
“Maybe it’s the virus.”  
  
_The_ virus.  
  
“The curse,” she corrects, and a jolt of terror slams through Sam.  
  
“It’s not,” he says. “The cure works, we know it does. There’s been no other symptoms. Right? There should be more symptoms by now.”  
  
“Should be.”  
  
“You’re just sick, Brigitte, you stayed out too long in fucking November. Without a proper coat. You’ve been… you’re just run down. Okay? We’ve got to… Let me see if I have any Tylenol or something.” He goes to the tap and pours her some water and says “Drink this, you need fluids.”  
  
He goes into the bathroom and finds the first aid kit. Inside there are bandages, iodine, scissors, butterfly stitches, but no medication. Not even Ibuprofen. “Shit… okay.”  
  
She’s made it through about a third of the water and he makes her drink more. She coughs and he takes it from her.  
  
“I’m tired.”  
  
“I know, but…” he wonders if he should take her to the hospital. She doesn’t look right. But are they just going to go sit in emerge for hours for the doctors to give her some fucking Tylenol and send her home? “Hey,” he says anyway. “Maybe you should see a doctor.”  
  
“No,” she says, adamant.  
  
“Why not?”  
  
“Because. What if I’m… different, now? What if…”  
  
Shit, he never even thought about that. What if her blood says ‘wolf’ now, somehow? What if his does? “Fine, then I’m going to run the bath.”  
  
He gets it lukewarm, a little cooler maybe and leaves it to fill and thinks he should have cleaned the tub better, but whatever, it’s not important now, and goes to linger at the threshold between the bathroom and the rest of the living space. She’s got her head hanging down between her shoulders again.  
  
“My head hurts.” He can barely hear her over the sound of the running water.  
  
“Yeah? Bad?”  
  
She shakes it slowly. “Just hurts.”  
  
Sam doesn’t know what to do for her. He doesn’t know how to take care of people, he just knows vaguely what he read, somewhere, probably at eight, in some survival guide for kids or something. He can do snake bites and quicksand and high fevers and dehydration. He can’t do teenage girl who doesn’t like to be touched and has no one else to comfort her.  
  
They are quiet for as long as it takes for the bath to fill up. It feels like forever. Sam turns the water off. “Hey… the bath’s full. It’s going to feel cold, but you only need to lower your temperature. Maybe fifteen, twenty minutes. Okay?”  
  
She nods and stands slowly, unsteadily, one arm out as if to find something to balance herself, but she’s okay. She’s fine. They pass each other and he turns back as she starts to close the bathroom door. “I’ll be right here.” He tells her. She’s clinging to the doorknob.  
  
“Um,” she says. She takes this long blink, furrowing her brow.  
  
He catches on before she falls, but just. He springs forward and catches hold of the door handle and her arm at the same time just as she drops like a pile of rocks.  
  
He can’t quite keep her from falling, because the bathroom is small and he clips his shoulder painfully against the edge of the doorframe, but he stops her from cracking her head off of the floor. He has to kind of wrestle his way in, past the door, past her tangle of legs like fawn-limbs, but she’s coming to already, and he’s got this death-grip on her arm just above the elbow. “You’re okay.”

**BRIGITTE**

She braces her free arm against the top of the toilet seat and steadies herself, and he lets her go. “Jesus. Do you normally pass out?”  
  
“Sometimes,” she says, blinking white spots from her eyes. The light in here is so bright, and her temples are pounding. She feels sick, like heat-stroke. Her fingers are shaking. “I’m okay now,” she says, because Sam’s looking freaked out and unsure and he’s very close and she doesn’t know what to do with that.  
  
He laughs a little, but it’s not humorous. “No you’re not.” And okay, he’s not wrong. “Okay… Brigitte, look. Let me help you. We’ll get your fever down, and then I’ll go get some medicine, I just… I’m not gonna leave you here like this.”  
  
She’s trying to get her head around this, around what he’s saying. It’s so bright in here. She presses her forearm against her eyes and she can feel the heat of her face, but not by much. “I feel cold.”  
  
“I know,” he says.  
  
“The light hurts.”  
  
“Start getting undressed, sit on the edge of the tub” he tells her. “Just. Don’t stand up.”  
  
He goes out and returns with the black pillar candle, and white tapers. She perches on the edge of the tub and watches him light them with his cigarette lighter. He flicks the overhead light off and they are suddenly washed in shadows that hurt her eyes less, and it feels familiar, like her and Ginger’s bathroom at home.  
  
She hasn’t moved to get undressed, mostly because she doesn’t feel steady, but also because he is here. She raises her eyes to his when he turns back to her, and she’s torn for a moment. She’s not like Ginger, this isn’t some revelatory moment. She isn’t hiding anything he can’t guess at beneath the too-big shorts and t-shirt she sleeps in, and it makes her feel like… _what’s the point? Why care?_  
  
She trusts him enough to be alone with him, to share a bed with him. She just doesn’t know if he’s doing this, doing all these nice things for her, because he, like Ginger said, wants to get into her pants. Maybe all guys are like that. Maybe what Pamela said is true, that all men are pretty much the same.  
  
He smiles at her suddenly, but his eyes are confused. “Why’re you looking at me like that?”  
  
“I’m just wondering…” she takes a breath because she feels foggy, and she closes her fingers harder around the edge of the tub.  
  
“You don’t have to, like… just leave your clothes on, we’ll deal with them later.”  
  
Brigitte wants to be better about this. Cooler. So far she feels like all she’s done is look like an idiot, a whiner. A stupid girl who goes out in minus twenty weather and digs a grave for a sister whose body she’ll never find again and then gives up on even that.  
  
She is so tired.  
  
She drops her eyes and takes hold of the bottom of the t-shirt and starts to pull it off, but her vision starts to darken again and she feels herself falling even as her heart rate ratchets up. For a moment she can’t see anything. The shadows spin around her, but then someone catches her by the arms, gentler than a moment ago, and she blinks and Sam is right there, and for a second she’s back in the pantry, Sam’s blue eyes looking black in the dim light.  
  
“Brigitte,” he says, and his voice is so tight with anxiety and she can’t even fucking undress herself. She’s just causing problem after problem. A big fucking drag.  
  
Like Ginger said.  
  
She squeezes her eyes shut, but the tears come anyway.  
  
“Whoa, whoa, it’s okay. Hey…”  
  
Why are guys so bad with crying?  
  
“I’m so tired,” she confesses. God she’s been tired for so long. And Sam says. “Let me help you,” so gently, but he doesn’t move at all. He’s waiting on her. He listens to what she says. He’s always listened. So she nods.  
  
"Yeah?" he asks, trying to catch her eyes.  
   
She meets them. "Yeah." Because... she doesn't know. Because she's tired. Because she wants him to see her, because she doesn't. Because maybe a part of her thinks of herself as something that disturbs and unsettles people, and maybe a part of her likes that. Maybe she wants to see if he will lose interest so that she doesn't _have_ to wonder anymore.  
   
He pulls back, and when he's sure she's steady, he reaches down and collects the fabric of her shirt at her sides, and the fabric seems to scrape at her skin as he gently pulls it over her head. The bird skull necklace falls heavily onto her chest, and her skin hurts, everything hurts.  
   
She wasn't wearing anything underneath, and she can't look up at him as he drops her shirt to the floor. "Okay," he says, "Stand up really slowly. Hold onto me." He crouches a little and takes her hand, and brings it to his shoulder, and holds it there with one of his. She fists hers beneath it in the fabric of his shirt. He touches her side, keeping her balance, and her head swims as she stands up, but her vision is steady.  
   
"Okay," he says again, like this litany, _okay, okay, okay_. She doesn't know if he's talking to her or to himself. He reaches down and, barely touching her hips, pushes her shorts and underwear off and down.  
  
Brigitte can honestly say she never pictured herself here, in this moment. And certainly not with Sam, the school drug dealer, the guy who's accidental glance across the school parking lot had set her heart racing almost two months ago. It feels like a _thousand_ years. That was the day that had started everything in motion. If she'd been able to hold her own against Trina at field-hockey. If she'd never made the list which included making it look like her dog had been eaten by the Beast of Bailey Downs, if they'd never gone out that night...  
   
She's still crying, maybe. Because all of this, sometimes, feels like her fault, because she's so overwhelmed by this moment she’s in, and her thoughts feel like they are swimming through soup. Her face feels hot, and then there’s Sam, who hasn't made her feel, even once, like he was checking her, who is still holding onto her so that she doesn't pass out again. And suddenly she is aware that they are both just standing here, just breathing. "I'm gonna lift you in, okay?" Sam asks, and he's got this low, soft voice that is different, somehow, than in the pantry and so she nods. "Put your arms around me."  
   
She just does as she's told, wraps her arms around his neck like she's a little kid. Sam bends to catch the backs of her legs and lifts her into his arms. She vaguely remembers being carried to bed by Pamela or... but that feels like another life. The motion makes her squeeze her eyes shut, her fingers going tight on his shirt and he misinterprets her vertigo and says “I've got you," and that helps somehow.  
   
At least someone does.  
   
The water is cold. She gasps against it, but she can tell by the way he reacts that it can't actually be that cold. Not as cold as it feels on her skin. He settles her into the tub and pulls back, not quite meeting her eyes as he sits back and their cheeks pass within a hair's breadth of each other. She pulls her knees up, but he says. "Try to get your shoulders below the water."  
   
The water itself makes her feel protected, less exposed, somehow, but not by much. Still, when she looks back at him, his eyes are on her face. He's sort of crouched at the edge of the tub, forearms arms braced against it, folded hands pressed to his mouth. He looks anxious, and the cold's shocked some life back into her brain and she can't quite help the soft laugh that escapes her, more a rush of breath than anything. "I'm not dying."  
   
"You can't feel how hot you are," he says, shifting back further. He reaches up and pulls the shower curtain across a little, giving her some privacy maybe. He rolls up onto the toilet seat and sits there so they are both facing the same direction, but she can still see him. She sinks lower into the water, holding herself tense against it. She lowers herself until it touches her bottom lip and her hair floats in a half-dry cloud around her. It feels gross and heavy with sweat. She scrubs some of the sweat off of her face with a wet hand and her limbs feel so heavy. The firelight glimmers off the water and she closes her eyes against the little light.  
   
Some time later, Sam says "Don't fall asleep in there," and she startles a little, because maybe she was. He reaches out and touches her cheek with the backs of his fingers and she, just opening her eyes again, disoriented, she goes still beneath his touch.  
   
"How do you feel?"  
   
"Better."  
   
"You're not as warm."  
   
"My eyes hurt."  
   
"Yeah? Let's get you back to bed."  
   
She sits up slowly, but she's steadier than before, her fever lower, her heart settled into a slightly more normal rhythm. Sam stands up and reaches down to help her. He says "Come on, sweetheart," like it’s natural, and she wants to sink into that, even though she feels like he's misplaced his affections.  
   
She really doesn't want him to have.  
   
Sam wraps a towel around her shoulders and sits her down on the edge of the tub again as he drains it. He finds her clean clothes. She does feel steadier, just weak and hurting. "I'm okay," she assures him, assures herself, and he leaves her, hesitantly, to get dressed while he strips the bed of the sweat-soaked blankets and replaces them with some of the ones they used for the bed on the floor.  
   
When she emerges, he makes her drink the rest of the water. She notices he’s got his shoes on.  
   
"Where're you going?" she asks.  
   
"Drug store. It should be open. We need some food anyway."  
   
She wants him to stay, but that feels childish, so she doesn’t say anything, just finishes the water and climbs back into the bed. He actually covers her up, but then he's gone. She falls asleep faster than she's used to, but it's fitful. By the time he comes back, it's bright out, and she doesn't open her eyes as she listens to him putting things away. He touches her forehead again and she pretends to sleep through it.  
   
She pretends to sleep through the way his touch disappears for a handful of seconds before he gently brushes some of her hair out of her face. He doesn't go in to work that day.

**SAM**

Now that they don’t have Brigitte’s sister to… no, that’s not the right way to say it. Now that they don’t have to worry about Ginger anymore, and the fact that she’s turning into something totally else, Sam thinks that Brigitte is different. Gentler, now that she doesn’t have to worry about every single death by the Beast of Bailey Downs being blood on her hands; now that she doesn’t have a sister to save; now that her entire world isn’t in flux. She’s softer-edged, maybe. And he’s starting to see, for the first time, how much she craves someone.  
  
He notices it in the way she stands closer to him than she has to, when he goes out for a smoke on those late December mornings — where the sun’s actually out, and the snow hasn’t been tramped down to grey slush. She stands close enough that her sleeve brushes his, and maybe she’s just cold in that shitty winter coat — and maybe he should figure out getting her a better one — or maybe she’s doing it on purpose.  
  
Sometimes he thinks he catches her watching him, but she always looks away a bit too fast for him to tell. And honestly, now that he’s got her here. Now that he’s got her in a real live way, and not in a way that feels like the Twilight Zone, or a goddamn horror movie, Sam wonders how he never noticed these two strange girls before now. And he kinda thinks that maybe he never actually even saw them. He can’t picture Brigitte or Ginger in a classroom, surrounded by smallternative kids who all look the same. He knows this because he _knows_ Bailey Downs High School, he fucking went there, back when. Before he was the school’s drug dealer. He brings this up one day, wonders whether she’s always lived here in this county of Ontario and she says “I noticed you,” in a way that makes his stomach flip. And it’s nuts, because now he finds it almost impossible not to notice Brigitte in a crowd. At the grocery store, at the new high school they found for her. Sam feels like she’s distracting as a flickering flame. Even dressed all in darks, she makes everyone else look darker. Negative space.  
  
And he realizes that Brigitte is like… really smart. He knew that she was. She’s the girl who knew what a lycanthrope was. She could piece together biology and botany even without Sam’s much more solid foundation. He’s got five years of learning this shit on her, but she’s got this mind that can put it together almost intrinsically — without the benefit of all the books Sam’s read and the apprenticeship he’d taken under his father before— whatever. Before shit happened… Anyway, she’s _good_ at school in a way Sam never was. She worries about it, she takes extra credit. In a handful of weeks she’s caught up, and then it’s winter vacation and she’s still got all this stuff to do. He marvels at it, because he barely went to class let alone did his homework, but he leaves her to it.  
  
Sam comes out one morning and isn’t at all surprised to see find Brigitte wrapped up in a heavy sweater using her open textbook as a writing desk as she takes notes, and he collapses onto the couch beside her. There’s no gardening work to be done these days. December to March are guaranteed to be slow months and Sam’s been going over his cash flow in his head, and the unemployment insurance he applies for every winter to get him through, and wondering if he can get it to stretch to cover both of them. He’s not sure how he’s going to do it, but he’s got to figure out something. It weighs heavy on him, but if he’s careful… if he sells more pot, maybe further out… He could make the drive to Toronto, hit a New Years party or something… he’ll figure it out.  
  
Groggily, he watches her work and then finally says “I know you’re caught up by now.”  
  
Brigitte finishes writing her sentence and then, without looking up says “I talked to my school counsellor. If I can get far enough ahead I can graduate early.”  
  
Sam looks at her, watches her reading. “Hey, aren’t you already graduating early? You skipped a grade, right?”  
  
“Grade eight,” Brigitte says. “Ginger didn’t want to go to high school without me.” She hesitates, dragging her lower lip through her teeth, then says, “And I didn’t want to be without her. So. She told me I should study harder to skip, so I did.”  
  
“Why didn’t she fail it; hang back with you?”  
  
Brigitte’s pen slows and she looks over at him. “Why?” she asks. “So she could spend one more year in Ontario school system hell?”  
  
It’s a good point. He shrugs and looks for his cigarettes. “Wasn’t that hard?”  
  
“Not as hard as going to school without Ginger.”  
  
Sam falls silent while he smokes. He thinks about getting up to make coffee, but doesn’t actually do it. With the grey winter days, the cold, the lack of green things, he can feel things getting harder. Simple things like making food, showering, getting up in the morning. It’s nothing new, and he knows not to let it bury itself too deep inside his chest or his head. Brigitte helps, but there’s no cure for this. Not yet. This isn’t like lycanthropy.  
  
“So what happens when you graduate early?”  
  
Brigitte stops writing to think, biting down on the end of the pen for a moment. “I don’t know. Before, me and Ginge were going to get out. Like, of Canada. If we made it out of Bailey Downs before…” She takes a breath. “Honestly, I don’t even know if I ever thought that far ahead.”  
  
“Yeah? Why’s that?”  
  
“We had a pact.”  
  
Sam butts out his cigarette, wondering if he should say it. But it’s bothering him, clinging to his throat the way pot smoke does. “Out by sixteen, right?”  
  
Brigitte looks at him sharply. “How do you know that?”  
  
“It was on the wall in your room. I kinda put the pieces together.”  
  
“It was just some… stupid promise we made as kids.”  
  
“Yeah, that is stupid.”  
  
“Killing yourself? Or putting a timeline on it?” Brigitte asks, and her eyes find his face from beneath her hair.  
  
“Both. Trust me.”  
  
“You would know?” Brigitte asks, and it’s halfway to gentle, but never quite makes it. Something cuts, but maybe that’s just Sam’s own guilt.  
  
“I usually just end up all turned around down the path of self-destruction.” Sam tells her. Because that’s what it feels like. The fucking woods. Like he’s lost, but knows he’ll get out again. He’s just trying to get away from all the shit for a while. Feel something cleaner than the fucking mess inside his head. The mess of his life.  
  
“You only hurt yourself,” Brigitte says, like she’s rewinding to that conversation they had weeks ago. “Anyway… we never actually wanted to be dead... or...” She's saying it slow, like she's not sure. “It was more like we needed a deadline, or like, were finding vindication in cynicism or something. Because… maybe everything’s fucked up, but at least _we_ were fucked up on purpose. Like at least then you realize that everything’s just a shit-show, instead of pretending it’s fine…”  
  
Sam’s got his eyes on her. “Must be a drag,” he says.  
  
“What?”  
  
“Bein’ so fuckin’ smart.”  
  
Brigitte fights against it, but in the end it wins and she smiles.

**BRIGITTE**

She doesn’t hate her new high school. Or at least hates it less than her old one. She also didn’t realize, somehow, just how _many_ Catholic high schools there were in Bailey Downs. In Ontario in general. The one she and Sam eventually find, just driving around one grey, snowy day, is just a regular old public school. It’s not as well taken-care of as her old school was. Its fences and basketball nets are all rusted and there’s no real green space to speak of, not even a soccer field. It’s basically just sitting in the middle of some suburb somewhere that looks a little sketchier than her old one, but that Sam says isn’t bad, just poorer. He knows a lot about weird places in Ontario. Mostly because of his work, but also because he used to take drives instead of go to class. He’d drive around, get high. It helped him survive high school, and she realizes, then, that Sam maybe isn’t a whole lot different than she is. He’s just got eight years on her. Eight years and a splinted black orchid, and all these fragmented ways to cope. He’s got a memory of what it feels like to touch something that shouldn’t exist, but does.  
  
Did.  
  
Before Brigitte killed it, because it wasn’t her sister anymore.  
  
She’s left alone in this high school, and she likes that. She thinks, for the millionth time, that it’s Ginger that people notice. Brigitte was like the parasitic twin, always just there, but not acknowledged. Feeding off of Ginger’s vivid, just caught up in the glow of it.  
  
Here, Brigitte fades into the background. And because it’s winter, and Sam’s mostly out of work, he comes up at lunch time, and she sits around the corner in his heated van with him and eats whatever he’s brought. They share the thermos of coffee and talk about whatever. About class, about something he read somewhere. Lately, they’ve been talking about when Sam was sixteen and how he survived it, but as soon as school’s out for winter break, they stop talking about that, and Brigitte thinks that those conversations — sometimes intense, searching — those are just for Sam's county van and the forty-five minutes she gets for lunch before the bell rings.  
  
She misses it.

**SAM**

They don’t go back to separate beds, and that’s… he isn’t really sure what to do with that. But he likes having her close, he likes sleeping next to someone, even if the bed is too small and he wakes up a lot during the night. Brigitte doesn’t. She sleeps hard, and he doesn’t know if that’s just her, or if it’s the fact that it feels safer, the two of them together.  
  
He wonders, now, if the virus has changed him in any way. He wonders if it’s altered things he can’t see. Wonders if it’s altered the way he feels things, but it seems like the cure works. It’s nothing like Ginger was, and she changed _fast_. Like twenty-eight days or something, by his calculation — from the moment he hit that thing with his truck and the night Sam almost died in Brigitte’s basement. The night Ginger did die. It’s been almost two months since Halloween and Sam doesn’t even have to shave any more than he used to. And it’s totally fucked because life just goes on. They both went through something completely life changing, and just a few weeks on they’re back to homework and worrying about bills and what do they want for supper tonight. Just a few weeks on and they’re sharing a bed, and he’s seen her without her clothes on, and he thinks she might be the best friend he’s ever had, or at least one of the most consistent, and if he’s being honest with himself, he doesn’t even know if she feels the same way. Maybe she’s just here because he lets her be. After all, she’s never said anything about wanting to stay with him, it’s all just been out of necessity. Hasn’t it.  
  
Sam tries to ignore the way that squeezes something in his chest.  
  
Christmas approaching surprises him the way it always does. Of course there’s Christmas stuff everywhere; as soon as the mummy hands and fake tombstones disappear from store shelves. And he’s already sick of hearing the same Christmas songs over and over where, for some reason, someone thought that every word needed to hit about fifteen different octaves purely to drive him and everyone else just trying to buy bread and eggs absolutely fucking nuts. It’s not like he doesn’t know it’s coming, it’s just that it’s weeks away, and then suddenly it’s less than a handful of days before Christmas Eve.  
  
These days, it’s too cold to even consider going out, so they spend most of their time in his room. She reads. First she reads his botany books but then he remembers he’s got a box of fiction and stuff he meant to sell to the used bookstore way at the back of his closet, and he digs those out for her. Now she’s halfway through _The Grapes of Wrath_. It turns out that they both read a lot of classics, both watch a lot of old movies. Neither of them like old music though. But she likes Neil Gaiman and it makes her feel more solid, somehow, to Sam. More real. She’s more than just a girl he thought was bitten by a lycanthrope. She’s more than the sister of the girl who actually was. That all seems halfway to a fairy-tale right now, in these moments where they both just hang around quietly, reading. Because it’s so fucking normal, and he doesn’t know how he feels about life just doing that. Going back to normal. He doesn’t know if he’s disgusted by it or impressed by human resilience. He wonders if he has the right to be disgusted by anything that’s just regular old human at all, now that he’s seen the things humans can become.  
  
“What are you doing this weekend?” she asks suddenly, holding her page with her finger.  
  
“Hm?”  
  
“Like, for Christmas.”  
  
“Oh… nothing.”  
  
“You’re not going to go see your family?” she asks, narrowing her eyes a little.  
  
Sam takes a breath and lets it out in a way that sounds too much like a sigh. “Nah.”  
  
“Why? Aren’t they going to wonder where you are?”  
  
“Not really. Or, I mean… they won’t really want me there. I’m sort of the family disappointment.”  
  
“Oh,” Brigitte says, and the silence that follows is one that means that it’s just about to break. Sam waits it out. “I think…” she says, “I should go see my mom.”  
  
In prison. Oh, shit. That’s going to be hard. Just completely fucking miserable. Aside from his family, the worst places he can think to be on Christmas are prison or the hospital, but he says “I’ll take you, if you want. Just tell me when you want to go.”

**BRIGITTE**

On the day before Christmas Eve, Brigitte pulls on her coat and boots and goes out to find Sam in the greenhouse. He’s surrounded by the poinsettias he’s been growing, and the last week or so has just been a total influx of orders that he has to get ready for delivery.  
  
She likes watching Sam work with flowers. He’s so careful with them, almost reverent. He goes somewhere else, disappears into his thoughts — like this is meditative, or healing somehow. And maybe it is. She feels like it might be… in any case, she never really thought that she would ever feel this safe again, the way she does here. And lately she’s been trying not to feel like that’s a betrayal. Ginger would have hated it. Ginger always wanted Brigitte to only love her.  
  
“Hey,” he says without looking up. “You ready?”  
  
“No,” she says. “But visiting hours end at three, so…”  
  
Sam stands up. He looks for a moment like he’s about to say something and then decides against it, passing her to go get the keys for the van.  
  
It’s busy, at the prison. Sam mutters “Jesus, this is so fucking depressing,” and she can’t even argue. She just reaches for the door handle to get out. Sam reaches out and gets his fingers around her wrist. Two fingers slide down over the scar on her palm and it gives her shivers. She turns back to look at him. “If you want me to go in with you…”  
  
She takes this breath as relief floods her, and she thinks if she has to say ‘yes,’ she’ll cry, so she just nods, and he gets out with her, into the frigid, blustery day and she thinks _thank you, thank you._  
  
Good fucking thing, too because there’s paperwork, and then there’s the dog they bring out to check for drugs and she thinks _oh, fuck_ , because what if it smells the wolf in her, the way Trina’s dog did in Ginger. What if they think she’s smuggling something in?

**SAM**

Sam hates cops, but he’d forgotten, or didn’t think, again. Obviously he’d swept all trace of drugs from the van the same day Brigitte even mentioned going to the prison. He even got his fucking coat dry cleaned, just in case. But then they bring the dog out and he realizes — it might not be drugs it detects.  
  
Fear surges through him, and he feels himself shift against Brigitte without even thinking, protective and afraid at once. The dog whines a little, nose against his wrists, against the pockets of his coat, but they aren’t stopped.  
  
They’re both patted down. It’s definitely not one of his top five experiences, but he can see from where he stands, arms out at his sides, and Brigitte across from him, mirroring his stance, that it’s so much worse for her, and Sam watches, heat roiling through his stomach and chest, as the cop slides his hands up the insides of Brigitte’s legs — perfunctory, but it still hits Sam hard — dragging her long skirt up her thighs. He doesn’t linger and lets it drop, but Brigitte’s got her eyes squeezed shut. She opens them when the cop runs his hands over her hair, pulling it through his fists, checking for contraband, and for a moment she looks so hard, so furious. The cop doesn’t notice. He just steps back. “She’s clear.”  
  
Brigitte’s eyes find Sam’s, whose sweatshirt is rucked up enough to feel his waistband. The cop is rough with him, and Sam takes half a step forward. “Stand still, sir.”  
  
Sam swallows his anger down. He stands still.  
  
“He’s clear.”

**PAMELA**

When they come to get her because she has a visitor at first she thinks it will be Henry, bringing her divorce papers to sign or something. And good riddance. But it isn’t. When she’s lead into the visitor’s room and sees Brigitte, her eyes well up despite herself.  
  
She crosses the room and holds out her arms, then stops. “Can I hug her?”  
  
She gets a nod, she gets the word “Briefly,” and then she has her daughter in her arms and Brigitte hugs her back. Something Pam can’t even remember — not since Brigitte was still little enough to be hugging her legs, anyway.  
  
She cries then, really cries, but she’s told that they’ve touched long enough, and they sit down together, a small table between them.

**BRIGITTE**

Brigitte thinks that Pamela looks smaller without all those hair things she used to wear. Today it’s just hanging down around her shoulders, and Brigitte’s wiping the sleeves of her shirt over her cheeks because she doesn’t know where to start. Finally she begins with “Mom, Ginger—”  
  
“I know,” Pam says. But of course she doesn’t. Not really. She just knows that Ginger is dead.  
  
And prison doesn’t magically make them have anything in common. Brigitte knew that it wouldn’t, but there’s enough to talk about anyway.  
  
“You’re not staying with Dad, are you?”  
  
“No, Dad’s…” Brigitte hesitates, then just says “he’s somewhere else.”  
  
“I knew it,” Pam says, with that same soft disgust. The kind that says, _I don’t like it, but that’s just the way things are._

**PAMELA**

Brigitte takes a breath and says “I’m staying with—” and she twists around to look at someone behind her, and for the first time, Pam notices the young man that’s been standing a few feet away, hands thrust awkwardly into his pockets. He catches Pam’s eyes and drops his gaze.  
  
“Oh,” Pam says, almost bright. And then she leans across the table, conspiratorial, and asks “Is he your boyfriend?”  
  
“No,” Brigitte says immediately. “He’s just— he’s Sam. He’s letting me stay with him. He…”  
  
“How long have you known Sam?” Pamela asks. She says ‘Sam’ like it’s something she’s never heard of. That she doesn’t quite trust.  
  
“For a while,” Brigitte assures her. Pam wants to press, but Brigitte has always been very evasive.  
  
“You always did have secrets. Even when you were a little girl,” Pam says and then, remembering. “You used to put earth worms in your pockets…” She reaches out and takes Brigitte’s hand. She has to reach with both, because she’s handcuffed.  
  
Her fingers touch raised flesh and she turns her palm over. “What happened?” she asks. The scar looks old — older than a few months. How could she not have noticed this?  
  
“I fell,” Brigitte tells her. “It’s okay now. I didn’t even need stitches.”  
  
“Oh, Brigitte. You have to be more careful.”  
  
Brigitte draws her hands away. “I am. I promise.” She’s searching again, for something to say, Pam can see it. Brigitte’s always been so shy. She wonders if she should have socialized them better, when they were small, but she just never had any time. Not with Henry always working, and Pam’s hands full with two little girls, not to mention decorating the house, cooking meals… it was a lot of work. But she helps her, Pam can always think of something to say. Ginger was more like her in that way.  
  
“He’s very handsome.”  
  
And for a split second, Brigitte meets her eyes, and Pam sees that she’s hit on something.  
  
“He’s just a friend,” Brigitte says, quickly.  
  
But Pamela is her mother. She can tell that there’s something different about this one, this boy.  
  
That’s what she tells herself, anyway.  
  
And when the visit is over, after their allotted half hour, there’s something about the way Brigitte goes back to him that speaks of relief, and Pam tries to think that it’s normal for children to feel safe with their chosen partners. She tries to think that it’s normal that her girls have always turned to someone other than her.  
  
She catches his sleeve as he follows Brigitte out but Pam holds him fast and he turns back to her.  
  
“Don’t hurt her,” she pleads. And he — Sam — looks quickly back to where Brigitte is still walking away — she hasn’t noticed yet that he isn’t with her.  
  
Sam looks back, he looks her square in the eye, and she expects defiance, annoyance — like the way Henry had looked at her — but there isn’t any, there’s just a whole lot of unguarded honesty.  
  
He looks like maybe there’s a lot he wants to say, but doesn’t know how. Someone says “No touching,” suddenly and Brigitte turns back, and their time is cut short. Pamela lets go of his sleeve immediately.  
  
“I’m— I won’t,” he says. Pamela is pulled away from him by her arms, but even though it’s not forceful, Sam tenses anyway. “I won’t,” he says again, eyes on hers.  
  
Like a promise. And Pamela thinks she might believe him.  
  
She wants to.

**BRIGITTE**

“What did she say to you?” Brigitte asks him, once they’re back in his van. They’re stopped at a stop sign and there’s no one behind them on these suburban streets, and so Sam doesn’t go right away.  
  
He pulls a cigarette out from behind his ear and presses the cigarette lighter in the car to heat it up, and just lets the unlit cigarette hang from his mouth. “Nothing, she just… she told me not to hurt you.”  
  
Brigitte looks away from him, out the windshield, twisting one of her rings around and around on her finger. “She thinks,” she begins carefully, “That every guy just wants to… like they only want one thing.”  
  
“Yeah, I kinda got that,” Sam says, “From what Ginger said.”  
  
_If he rapes you? Don’t come crying._ Brigitte can still hear it. Ginger’s voice in her ear, always.  
  
“Sorry,” Brigitte says, because it’s the only thing she can think of. How does she explain Pamela, anyway? And why should she explain her to Sam? “Thanks for coming.”  
  
“I’m not going to, you know,” Sam says. “Like, hurt you. I mean… we’re friends, right?”  
  
The cigarette lighter pops out, startling her. Sam’s got his eyes fixed on the road ahead, even though he still hasn’t gone. He fiddles with the windshield wipers, turning them on and off again. And Brigitte thinks about how it’s not even snowing. Suddenly this silence is painfully awkward, and her heart’s racing in her chest. She swallows. “Are we?” she asks, and it’s a genuine question, but it comes out sounding a little blunt. She reaches out and pulls the cigarette lighter out and reaches, boldly, taking his cigarette from his lips. She puts it between her own and lights it, and he’s watching her again, and for a second she feels kind of cool. Kind of. It gives her time to think.  
  
“I mean… jesus christ, Brigitte, there’s no one else in the world I could share a space with. Fucking two hundred square feet of… that’s not even a fucking bachelor apartment.”  
  
“How can you want to be friends with me,” Brigitte asks, and she hears her voice start to shake, “when I’ve only fucked you over? I lied to you, I told you _I_ was the one who was bit. I— I’ve only been an inconvenience to you since this whole thing started.”  
  
“That’s bullshit,” Sam says. Someone pulls up behind them and honks their horn. Sam actually rolls down his window to a blast of cold air and gives them the finger. Brigitte huddles further down in her seat, holding the cigarette away from her mouth as the van jerks forward a little too fast and Sam peels off.  
  
“I had a choice. I chose Ginger,” she says when she feels like her voice will be steady enough.  
  
“Then what the fuck are you still doing here?” Sam asks, almost soft. It’s the second time he’s asked her that now. Like he’s giving her clues to something she can’t figure out. What _is_ she doing here? He glances over and then snatches his cigarette back from her.  
  
She’s silent. Sam slows down a little. He exhales cigarette smoke hard. “Have you ever actually had a friend?”  
  
She can feel herself tearing up and she doesn’t know why. She blinks against it and says, voice deadpan, “I didn’t need one.”  
  
“Well… fuck it. I’m your friend. You don’t have to be mine.”  
  
Brigitte doesn’t say anything until they pull into the drive of the greenhouse. Sam unbuckles his seatbelt but she doesn’t move, so he waits. Waits for her. All of his annoyance has faded. She doesn’t feel pressured, and the silence settles around them. Eventually her ears stop ringing from the constant sound of the engine.  
  
She takes a breath and has to hold it in her lungs before she can psych herself up enough to say it. “You said you didn’t think of me that way.” She blinks. Her eyes are stinging, but she thinks maybe it’s the cigarette smoke still caught in the van, even though he put it out long ago. When she looks over, she meets his eyes. “Is it still like that?”  
  
He searches her eyes, opens his mouth to speak but can’t seem to find the words. She watches him drop his eyes, searching the space between them as the overhead light fades away. He wets his lower lip in the dark. Night comes so fast here in the winter, and it feels so long.  
  
“I like you, Brigitte,” he says.  
  
She shakes her head a little. “I don’t know what that means.”  
  
There’s a long silence then. Sam is looking at her again, and then he isn’t, again, searching for the words he doesn’t know how to say. Or maybe he just doesn’t want to say them. Either way, she thinks maybe, _maybe_ she does get it.  
  
“When I had a fever? The bath?” Brigitte says, like she’s prompting him.  
  
“That’s not… what that was,” Sam tells her, and he meets her eyes, and he’s dead serious. She can see the white gleam of his teeth in the darkness. “I wanted to… I was trying to take care of you. Because I do. Care. I do care,” he says, like he’s having trouble pasting the sentence together. Like a ransom note. She feels a little like she’s forcing this out of him, and maybe she is — getting all these confessions, all these little pieces that still, she thinks, don’t make up all the pieces of a whole, because she has no idea what the whole thing looks like. “I wasn’t like— I wasn’t thinking of you like that.”  
  
“That night? Or ever.”  
  
“I… what’re you asking me?” he asks.  
  
“What if I wanted you to?”  
  
And they both go silent. Logically, she knows there are sounds. The wind, their breathing, the van’s engine clicking as it cools down. But she can’t hear any of them.  
  
And then Sam reaches across the console and runs his fingers over the back of her hair to her neck, and he kisses her on the mouth.  
  
It’s not long, it’s not even really a good kiss, like, at all, because she freezes, her lips slightly parted, and for a moment his are against hers, and his mouth is warm but his hand is cold on her skin through her hair. It’s over so fast. He pulls away, but he is still touching her, for a moment. He runs his fingers from her neck to her jaw and slides his thumb over her cheek, and then he’s gone, back on his side and Brigitte’s left to gauge the damage but her mind’s running to fast to even do that. She thinks she gets it now.  
  
“Oh. Okay,” she says and oh, god, she really does sound like an idiot.  
  
Sam scrubs the bridge of his nose, the line of his cheekbone with his fingers and she wonders for a second if he’s grossed out, or ashamed or just… what?

**SAM**

“Yeah, I can kiss better than that,” Sam says.  
  
Brigitte actually rolls her eyes. “I mean, there’s not exactly a lot of competition.”  
  
He laughs, sort of helplessly. She’s starting to shiver now that the van’s been off for so long, and he feels the cold, too, in spite of the heat in his chest. And the weight that’s settling in on him now because what if…  
  
_Fuck_.  
  
“Brigitte, I don’t… know if this is what this is, but you don’t owe me anything. You know that, right? Like… I want you here. I… jesus. I really meant what I said about… the space. I think we’re really good—” As friends? Is that what he wants? Is that what this isn’t?  
  
“Is that what you think?” Brigitte asks him. It’s her lecture voice. “That I would say that because I thought that I _owed_ you?”  
  
“I just… want to be clear.”  
  
“You’re clear,” she says. He’s pissed her off. Or maybe she’s freaking. And Sam thinks _she’s fifteen years old_ and he thinks ‘What if I wanted you to?’  
  
“Okay, great.” Sam says. “We’re clear.”  
  
And he wonders if she’d let him kiss her again, and he wonders if he should. He wonders if wondering if he should makes the answer ‘no.’  
  
He thinks about kissing her again.  
  
“Let’s go in,” he suggests. She nods and pushes open her door, and he follows her out into the snow, and then into the warmth of the greenhouse.


	4. Chapter 4

**BRIGITTE**

Sam follows her without another word into the greenhouse and, okay, she’s freaking. Her hands shake as she unlocks the door to his room with the spare key he’d given her and lets herself inside, not bothering to hold it for him.  
  
Sam just kissed her.  
  
She glances at him furtively from beneath her hair as he takes his coat off and she retreats towards the bed where she normally takes refuge during the day, but now it feels strange, and she stops and makes an awkward half turn to stand next to the table instead, fingers sliding over the back of the wooden chair, feeling for splinters.  
  
Sam kissed her. And she definitely sucked at it. Suddenly she’s mortified. Why didn’t she at least respond? Ginger would have known what to do. Ginger _did_ , somehow, with Jason. Knew how to kiss him, how to touch him. In this moment, Brigitte can’t even imagine putting her hands on Sam at all, because he would be too real and too alive beneath them, and he just _kissed_ her, and, _god_ , she likes him. And now he probably thinks she’s just as much of a freak as everyone at her old high school did.  
  
And also… also, she’s standing here thinking about kissing guys, and she doesn’t know who she is, altogether, when she thinks that way.  
  
Sam runs a hand through his hair and down to the back of his neck and meets her eyes, and she feels almost the same way she did when he caught her eyes forever ago from behind the wheel of his van.  
  
Except now he’s kissed her. It’s not safe in her head anymore. It’s not just hers alone to carry, where no one else could touch it. Not even Ginger. Because Sam kissed her, and now she’s freaking.  
  
Because maybe she really, really wanted him to.  
  
“Hey, so—” Sam begins, but he seems like he isn’t really sure where to go. “Um.”  
  
Brigitte tips her chin down further, because she’s afraid of what he’s going to say, of the excuses he’s going to make.

**SAM**

Sam is suddenly struck by a thought that makes him bite hard on his lower lip, standing awkwardly in the middle of the room. “When you said ‘not a lot of competition’, did you mean…”  
  
“Why?” Brigitte asks, all tension and distrust.  
  
“I just… please don’t tell me that was your first kiss.”  
  
Brigitte furrows her brow, eyes narrowed, defensive. And then she says, deeply sarcastic: “Oh yeah, I’ve got lineups of guys just waiting for that.”  
  
_Fuck_ , Sam thinks, wincing. Because suddenly he’s pissed because he should have been more thoughtful. He shouldn’t have done it in his shitty van that smells like pine and, faintly, warm metal from the power tools, but also, mostly just like cigarette smoke. He shouldn’t have kissed her so fucking out of nowhere and so badly. He realizes now that she probably didn’t even realize that it was coming. Because she’s — goddamn it, she’s a kid. And Sam’s kissed enough people that it doesn’t feel special anymore, but he knows that it did, once.  
  
He’d totally forgotten, until now, that it did feel special, that first time. And maybe Sam’s gotten so used to not feeling anything good inside of himself, not acknowledging that good, that it shocks him now when he recalls it, and that upsets him way more than it should, because Brigitte deserved better than what he did just now; that blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, ungainly press of his mouth against hers.  
  
“I think…” Sam says, “That you should just scrap that memory completely.” (Even though the feeling of her mouth sparked a fire in him).

**BRIGITTE**

At first she thinks he’s backing out completely, that he wants to pretend it didn’t happen, and her heart sinks. She feels like everything good she’s started to feel since Ginger’s death is just sucked out from inside her, leaving her feeling brittle and hollow.  
  
But then he says “Sorry, Brigitte, I dunno what I was thinking. That’s, that wasn’t…  it’s— someone’s going to kiss you better than that, so let’s just… forget this.”  
  
She raises her head a little, letting his words sink in. She sees herself in Sam for a moment, and she sees what he’s doing, she thinks. This isn’t guilt. This isn’t him just wanting to see what it’s like to kiss the weirdo, the freak. This is something totally else. It gives her enough courage, in the silence that follows where Sam isn’t looking at her to say “What if I like that it was you?”  
  
He meets her eyes, and his fidgeting stops. He drops his hand from the back of his neck and goes still. Brigitte takes a slightly shaky breath. “And,” she adds, “Just for the record? You are my friend.”  
  
Sam takes this deep breath, like he hadn’t been breathing for a while. He blinks against something, eyes dropping from hers. “Thanks,” he says after a moment.  
  
Brigitte doesn’t know where to go from here. She doesn’t know if telling him she considered him a friend messed everything else up? She doesn’t know how this works, only what she’s been told.  
  
“For the record,” Sam says, “You’re crazy if you think that some people out there _aren’t_ going to want to kiss you.”  
  
“It’s different. They just want to get some.”  
  
Sam starts to say something, then shakes his head, moving towards his closet as he pulls his hoodie over his head. “Whatever.”  
  
“What’s that supposed to mean?”  
  
“It means—” he tosses the sweater down onto the bed, leaving just his t-shirt on underneath. “Is that all you think of me?”  
  
Brigitte hesitates. “You’re different.”  
  
“ _How_?”  
  
Brigitte searches his eyes. “You’re not like the guys at school.”  
  
That feels worse than it should. “Yeah,” Sam says. “Because I’m twenty-fucking-three years old, Brigitte; people change.”  
  
“So, what, everything you told me was a lie?”  
  
“ _No_ , but I didn’t tell you about how I was to the girls I fucked when I was in high school.”  
  
“Why not?”  
  
“Because, why? It’s— it’s done now. And that’s the thing, Brigitte, you know? High school’s just… like a fucking blip on the radar. You’re gonna get out of here, everything’s going to change, and so much of this won’t matter.”  
  
“Everything’s already changed,” Brigitte says, and there’s tears in her eyes, but she doesn’t let them fall. “I think it’s going to be a little bit more than a ‘blip on the radar’ for me.”

**SAM**

“Fuck,” says Sam, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”  
  
Brigitte shakes her head, taking a breath, blinking the tears back. “I always noticed you,” she tells him, and her voice shakes. “In spite of _everything_. Even though Ginger and me thought it was so sick, the way high school is, people just _breeding_ everywhere. Even though I _never_ thought that I’d even, like, care about some guy. But with you—”  
  
She stops, checking herself, reigning herself back. She’s real far away, going over memories, thoughts.  
  
“I didn’t want to,” Brigitte says. “That’s so not me. It wasn’t _us_. And I always told Ginger that you just wanted to help, that was all. But I was lying. And eventually, I don’t think I even cared anymore. Like, about what she wanted.”  
  
Sam’s heart is pounding. “Shit went down, you know,” he tells her. “If we’d… if she could have been cured, and everything went back to normal, you’d forget all about me.” He smiles at her, and it’s almost genuine. Because he’s not worth the sentiment.  
  
Brigitte’s holding his eyes, holding herself tense, her jaw set. “Or maybe it would’ve been you who forgot about me.”  
  
He should let it go, let it drop, because she’s given him an out and she knows it. He can pull out of this right now. And he should, because _legally_ , he’s sure that this is wrong, but it doesn’t feel that way. But god, he wants to be honest with her.  
  
“I really wouldn’t have,” Sam says. “But, Brigitte, we… you’re fifteen. That can’t be legal.”  
  
She gives him this incredulous look. “ _You’re a drug dealer_.”  
  
“That’s different!”  
  
Brigitte’s face softens a little, but she doesn’t take her eyes off of him, considering. “You only hurt yourself,” she says, softly.

**SAM**

Sam thinks of his dad, of Trina. “Not true,” he says. An uncertain silence settles heavily around them.  
  
And then Brigitte says “This would be easier if you _were_ a cherry hound.”  
  
Sam barks out a laugh that’s more shocked than humorous, but it eases something in his chest. “What would be easier?” he asks, because he wants her to say it — he wants to really get where she’s coming from, so that he’s _sure_.  
  
“Our entire lives changed,” Brigitte says, letting go of the back of the chair to pace a little. “Ginger’s and mine. And when I found you and asked you for help, you came willingly. And you never bailed on me, not once. You’re the only person…” she takes a sharp breath. “You’re the only other person who really knows what happened… You’re the only person I have left.” Her voice cracks.  
  
“Okay,” Sam says, trying to stop her before she reaches this edge, because she looks like she wants to cry again, and he doesn’t want her to. He wishes she wasn’t hurting anymore. “Okay,” he says again, but this time it’s a little different. This time, maybe…  
  
“I know. I mean— I _know_ , but Brigitte, that’s… that makes it so much worse if it gets messed up.”  
  
“Does it always get messed up?” she asks, voice tight, frustrated.  
  
“In my experience, yeah, it does.” Brigitte folds her arms crossly, hugging herself. She turns away from him almost completely. “Look, I just don’t… want to do that to you. On top of everything else.”  
  
She rounds on him now, her eye contact hard. “So _don’t_ ,” Brigitte says, and Sam realizes he's making excuses again. “And, also? You’re not going to _break_ me. You’re always asking me why I’m still here, it’s because I don’t _want_ to go anywhere else. I’m here because that’s where _you_ are, but if you honestly think that _I_ can’t fucking deal if everything goes to hell? After everything? You haven’t been paying attention.”  
  
Sam holds her eyes, and he listens. _Really_ listens. Finally he nods, once. “No. You’re right.”  
  
“And? What?” she asks, still guarded against him, this contradiction of a girl.  
  
“Okay, yeah, you’re right. You’re right.” He studies her, searches her face. “What do you want me to say? I just think… I mean, things are still kinda fucked, you know? In flux. Maybe we should give it some time.”  
  
Brigitte rolls her eyes. “Or maybe you should just kiss me properly.”  
  
Sam feels himself pull in a breath — startled, wanting. He exhales the smallest laugh, because christ, she’s something. Something fierce and altogether human. Just Brigitte. He steps across the room until he reaches her and she uncrosses her arms to him, but she’s still holding herself tense, hiding behind her hair. And Sam thinks about how much he wanted to kiss her in the pantry at her house on Halloween. He thinks about how still she was in the van tonight when he did.  
  
He gently takes her face in both hands, sliding his fingers beneath her hair, but doesn’t force her head up. She takes this breath and holds it for a second, and when she starts breathing again, it’s shallower, all anticipation. But he can’t kiss her like this, her face angled down, and he doesn’t try, yet. He slides his hand back until his thumb slides against her earlobe and she closes her eyes, letting that little pressure push her back ever so slightly.  
  
Sam wants to push her long hair away from her face, but doesn’t. That’s her protection, and he doesn’t want to take it from her. He slides his hands down over her neck instead, the tips of his fingers against the column of her throat, and then to her shoulders, down her arms. He finds her hands, which are curled into tight fists, but she relaxes as he ghosts his fingers over her wrists, she lets him slide them over her palms, opening them up, and he feels for the spaces where his fingers can get in between hers, and he just holds her hands for a moment. He can feel a heartbeat, there, fluttering frantically where they’re holding onto one another.  
  
Brigitte says “Is that your pulse or mine?”  
  
And Sam laughs softly and says “I don’t know.”  
  
She take another breath and looks up at him, and he pulls back enough to meet her eyes, but doesn’t let go of her hands. She’s looking at him, taking him in like she’s trying to memorize his face, her fingers squeezing tight between his so that his attention centres there at that rapid beat beat beat between them. He swallows, and then she moves marginally closer.  
  
His nose slides against hers as he leans down, and their mouths are so close he can feel her breathing unevenly. It’s not really a kiss, again, when his mouth brushes hers, but he’s still feeling this out, letting her drive if she wants to. And then she presses up, startling him, and it’s real, suddenly. He lets go of one of her hands to get his fingers into the back of her hair, stabilizing himself, and he kisses her back.  
  
She frees her hand from his and he feels her close her fingers into his t-shirt, just over his hip like she’s afraid he’s going to go somewhere. The kiss is surprisingly hard, at first, she’s unpliable, but then he coaxes her mouth further open, his tongue sliding against hers and she presses right into his arms.  
  
He thought she was close before, because they haven’t been, really, but now she’s _pressed_ against him, hip to chest, and he’s got this fistful of her hair, and a hand holding her, now that he’s got her, by the small of her back and she keeps opening her mouth to him, again and again.  
  
He almost doesn’t realize they’ve stepped back until they’re stopped by a solid object; her back hitting the table, catching his fingers there for a moment.  
  
“Shit, sorry,” he says, but she says “Shut up,” almost urgently, and reaches out, grabbing the collar of his shirt to pull him down to her again. He doesn’t argue. With the table bracing her, Sam doesn’t need to hold on, so he buries both hands in her hair, pushing it back at her temples, fingers pulling through soft tangles. His thumb drags against her cheek, and she makes a sound, and then their position shifts. He loses her for a moment as she pulls herself up with her hands to sit on the table. He takes a breath that doesn’t really feel like it fills his lungs at all, and for a moment they just look at each other, panting.  
  
Sam steps forward, fingers falling tentatively to the outside of her thigh, covered by her heavy skirt. She reaches for him, gets her fingers in the font pocket of his jeans and tugs him closer. He catches the hem of it which is still hanging down past her knees and pushes it up over her thighs enough so that he can step between them, the fabric of her skirt pooling between their bodies.  
  
“Brigitte,” Sam says, softly, for no reason at all, and she looks up at him, waiting, so he kisses her again. Because what else could he possibly say? He’s holding her face when Brigitte catches his lip between her teeth, nipping, but not nearly hard enough to break the skin, and he doesn’t know why, but he smiles against her mouth, then pulls back.  
  
She looks uncertain, anxious, but then catches the look on his face and presses her lips together so that she doesn’t smile back. He’s right between her legs, holding the outside of her thigh, the layers between his palm and her skin driving him fucking insane.  
  
“Okay, we should stop,” Sam says, gentle. “Because…”  
  
She gets it, that it’s not because he doesn’t want to, but because it’s too much right away, for so many reasons. She nods, both of them still catching their breath and slowly, slowly, he untangles himself from her. She brings her legs together, pushing her skirt down with both hands, then takes hold of the edge of the table in loose fists.  
  
“…Wow,” he says, a little dazed.  
  
She scoffs softly, looking away from him like maybe she doesn’t believe him, and jesus, but he’s soft for her, because he says “That was really nice,” and it works, because she looks up at him again, actually meets his eyes, and he feels like he’s fucking won a prize at a fair. All the pretty lights and everything.  
  
“Oh—” Brigitte says, and then like she’s having trouble piecing her sentences together, she finishes with “—kay. Good.” She’s dropped her gaze again and Sam’s just looking at her and thinking that he’s already promised not to hurt her, and how he’s so done making excuses. He’s always been good at those, but maybe, he thinks, he’s good at promises, too.  
  
“Now what?” Brigitte asks, wincing a little.  
  
“Now, whatever,” Sam tells her. “Whatever you want.”

**BRIGITTE**

She thinks _I want someone to tell me what to do_ , because they’ve been quiet for too long, and his eyes are on her like maybe he’s waiting for something, but she doesn’t know. What do you do when you’re scared because you just kissed someone you really, really like?  
  
“I— I’m not gonna be good at this,” she tells him. The words just spill out in a kind of panic. He shakes his head.  
  
“You don’t have to be good at anything. You’re good enough. Hey…” Sam takes this half-shaky breath. “Okay, let’s just… you want to watch something?”  
  
Brigitte thinks about the couch, how small it is, how close they’ll be. She thinks about the way the couch blankets smell like Sam’s — smokes and coffee and soil. She sneaks a glance at him and wishes she’d gotten her hands into his hair when she had a chance and, cheeks hot, quickly tears her gaze away, looking around the room.  
  
“You like to play cards?” she asks.  
  
Sam’s deck has faded wildflowers painted on the backs. They’re creased and yellowed with age, edges soft. They’re hard to shuffle, but it gets them with the TV table between them, Sam slouched over his knees on the couch, Brigitte on the floor, wrapped in a blanket.  
  
They play their way through a single game of Blackjack. After that, it’s several rounds of Crazy Eights (it takes a while to agree on the rules), all of which Sam loses spectacularly. (He blames her rules). As consolation, he starts drinking. Crazy Eights is followed by War, and then, finally Slapjack.  
  
Eventually, it’s past midnight, and Brigitte, who is sober, has far better reflexes than he does. A third of the way through a bottle of rye, he’s so piss poor at it that Brigitte starts laughing, and he realizes he’s never heard her do that before. She’s resting her forehead on her arm, crossed over the table, before he can even catch a glimpse of it, though, the cards she’s won still in her hand.  
  
“It’s definitely not fair for me to keep beating you, now,” she tells him. She’s obviously pleased with herself.  
  
“No, you’re fucking cruel.”  
  
“You’re drunk,” she says, as a counter-argument.  
  
“Good observation, officer,” he says, playing back to the first time they spoke.  
  
She breathes a laugh through her nose, but there’s a heaviness to her, now, to the air around her. Simpler times. Or something. “You should drink some water,” she tells him.  
  
“Yeah,” he says, rolling to his feet. He gets some, turning to lean back against the small stove, watching her gather the cards together, organizing them so the wildflowers on the backs are right side up. She’s very focussed. He wants to touch her — her hair, her hands, anything.  
  
“Where are you sleeping tonight?” he asks her, as though it hasn’t been the same for weeks.  
  
She looks up at him, her face half-shadowed. “…the bed?” she offers, like she’s not sure she’s going to be allowed.  
  
Sometimes he thinks that she’s been hurt. Methodically. Sometimes he thinks he knows by who.  
  
“I just…” says Sam, voice very soft. She stops even stacking the cards into a neat pile to hear him. “… I want to hold onto you.”  
  
He wouldn’t ever fucking say it if he wasn’t drunk. He wouldn’t have the guts.  
  
She blinks, like she’s clearing her vision, that uncertain, startled look, always.  
  
“Not obligated,” Sam tells her. “I just thought—”  
  
“Okay,” she says, cutting him off. She puts the cards back into their worn out box and stands up, holding the blanket in both arms.  
  
Sam doesn’t watch her collect her things to change. He turns away as she steps into the bathroom and finishes his water. He washes the glass for no other reason than because it gives him something to do while she emerges and gets into the bed.  
  
He waits until the springs stop creaking, until she’s settled, then turns back to her. She’s sitting crosslegged, the blankets pushed down, but her back against the wall, facing him. There’s nothing left to do but turn out the lamp and go to her.  
  
He can still see her outline in the dark, thanks to the outdoor lights at the far end of the greenhouse, the streetlamp near the west window. Sam takes his jeans off, leaving just his t-shirt and underwear on, and when he climbs onto the bed, she’s looking down, hidden by her hair, picking at hangnails.  
  
He kneels on the bed opposite her, his back to the room, hers to the wall. They’re close enough that their knees brush. She raises her hand to her mouth and bites down on her fingernails as she looks up to meet his eyes.  
  
Sam shifts enough to get under the covers, and she half uncrosses her legs like she might follow. He touches the inside of her wrist, the one still supporting herself on the mattress. “Hey. You don’t have to.”  
  
She slides under the covers anyway, one leg at a time, burrows down beneath them. She’s facing him, but like this, shielded from the light by his body, he can’t really see her eyes — just a glitter in the darkness. He reaches, finds her shoulder against the mattress, then trails her collarbone, the hollow of her throat. He pushes her hair back behind her ear. “Hey, Brigitte Fitzgerald.”  
  
“Hey,” she breathes.  
  
“You okay?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
He edges ever so slightly closer. The sheets are cold. He can feel goosebumps on her skin where the sleeve of her t-shirt ends, and suddenly she presses right into his arms. Her forearms separate her chest from his where she’s holding them tightly against herself, but she tucks her head down into his chest so his nose is in her hair, and he gets his arm around her and buries his fingers in it.  
  
She inhales through her nose against him, breathing him in, and he shivers, even though he’s not really cold.  
  
And it’s nice. His forearm fits right between her shoulder blades. She’s wearing heavy wool socks, and he feels one slide against the inner bone of his ankle, followed by the cool shock of the skin of her calf. Sam swallows, dipping his face further into her hair which is softer than he imagined it would be.  
  
She smells like the Fitzgeralds’ house, a little. Like all people smell a little like the places they’re from, and that sits weirdly with him — after all, he almost died there. He’s not about to give up this closeness, though. It’s eased something he didn’t know was wrapping around him — all this tension and worry and stress just seems to melt away. He can’t remember the last time he felt so fucking blissed.  
  
He just feels it, that impossible peace he didn’t even know he was missing. Just lies with it quietly for a while, even after her breathing deepens, and she falls asleep against him.  
  
And that, Sam realizes, is trust. And he doesn’t think anyone’s ever trusted him before. Not really. Not like this.  
  
And he plans to earn it.

~*  
  
He doesn’t know when he falls asleep, but morning comes and she’s still in his arms, even though she’s turned to face the wall. It’s not just that, though. When he shifts to move or maybe get up, he wakes her — or maybe she, like him, was already awake, and just lying with this closeness for a while — and she rolls onto her back, her shoulder pressed against his sternum. She rolls it forward, pulling her arm from beneath the sheets to cross over her own body so that it doesn’t dig against him.  
  
Their eyes meet.  
  
“Hi, Sam,” she says, sort of half repeating the way he called her by her full name last night. “Hungover?”  
  
“Not much.”  
  
“Coffee help?” she asks, already sitting up. He watches her.  
  
“Yeah, okay…”  
  
It’s could out there, in the room. Sam rubs at the headache behind his eyes, but then he watches her, going through the motions of their mornings. Normally he makes the coffee, but she’s watched him enough times that she knows how to work the machine, knows all the fixes where the filter tray has to be jiggled to come out and how the buttons stick. She knows you have to slam the lid down to get it to latch.  
  
Sam sort of feels like they’re doing everything backwards, but maybe they’re not. He watches her choose mugs. He’s got a bunch. It used to be a family thing — mugs for Christmas — and some of them he’s kept — dragged around with him from place to place until he finally ended up here — the place he never thought he would — the fucking family business. The family crypt.  
  
He sits up to take the cup when she brings them over. She hands him both, then climbs back over his legs to sit up against the wall, blankets pulled over her legs, and he hands her her cup back.  
  
She holds it in both hands, close to her chest. Her hair’s a mess, more than normal. He thinks it might actually just be wavy, because it dries that way from wet. Before she goes to school some days, she brushes it into something smoother, tamer, but never really straight. And by lunch time, it’s all frizz and wild again, and he thinks that she looks smaller beneath it.  
  
“What you were saying yesterday,” Brigitte says, “about high school being just a blip on the radar… did you really mean that?”  
  
“Yeah, I guess,” Sam says. “I mean, I didn’t forget it, but all these things I thought were a big deal, at the time? I guess I kinda forgot about them.”  
  
Her eyes flicker between his. “Didn’t you ever want to get out of this place?”  
  
“Yeah, I did,” Sam says. “But then life just… keeps on knocking you down a few pegs, and then it was like…”  
  
“How did you end up here? The county greenhouse?” She almost smiles, making gentle fun of him, maybe. “It seems like a lot for someone who’s just growing pot.”  
  
“So this business was my grandfather’s Sam tells her, “Back when this place was still basically a township. My dad left high school because he had depression and other shit, but back in those days they didn’t call it that. Or at least my family didn’t. He took it over when Granddad died. Hired some people but they never worked out. Gardening’s kind of turning into a lost art. It’s not exactly summer job type shit, not the way my dad wanted it done. He was super particular on top of everything else.”  
  
“So…” Brigitte says, when Sam stops.  
  
He looks at her. “You looking for the sob story, or the condensed version?”  
  
She goes dead serious. “Just tell me how you see it.”  
  
Sam searches her eyes. “Okay, so. My dad’s depression got worse, and eventually my mom left him, right after I started high school. She wanted me to come with her, but she moved to Toronto, and I thought… maybe. But I went there, Brigitte, and it was all concrete, the buildings so high they give you vertigo. And I guess maybe I realized I really was just this fucking small-town kid that didn’t really fit in anywhere. Definitely not there. I didn’t… _like_ the way I felt there.”  
  
He thinks about getting a cigarette, but they’re all the way over on the TV table so he doesn’t. “ ‘Course, I didn’t like the way I felt here, either, but it was better than that place. At least here, there’s still trees and fields and woods and shit. Open sky, you know? Toronto there was barely a sliver of it. Even their parks felt… like a big trap. Like when they put mice in these big enclosures so that they feel free, but they’re still fucking walled in by glass, you know? You ever been to Toronto?”  
  
Brigitte shakes her head.  
  
“Yeah, well… you’re not missing much.”  
  
Sam takes a deep breath. “So I stayed here. Anyway, it turns out that depression’s genetic. I… had a breakdown or something, right after high school. Dunno why. It was just a culmination of a bunch of stuff, and it hit really hard. I never tried to _kill_ myself, but it was… bad. Bad enough that I didn’t go the the university I got into, so—”  
  
“For what?”  
  
“Huh? Oh, Biology. Biology was the only thing I could do. Well. Everything else, I was shit at, except for like… art, but.”  
  
She smiles at him a little, like she gets it. Or at least like she sympathizes.  
  
“Anyway, so I stayed here. And Dad said that I could work for him, get some money together, and go next year.” Sam presses the edge of his mug to his mouth and then he says, voice almost low enough to be deadpan. “One thing led to another, and I didn’t go.” He sighs. “And then he killed himself on some fucking fishing trip, and left me this place, and some money, and I set up shop here, and that’s the story.”  
  
Silence falls.  
  
“That’s… really awful,” Brigitte says, finally, and he can see she means it. “How old were you?”  
  
“Nineteen.”  
  
She blinks and drops her eyes to the cup, picking at a chip in the edge of it.  
  
“You know I remember when they built your house? That whole neighbourhood across the field from here, actually. I was seven or something, and pissed, because there used to be this group of flowering Dogwoods growing wild there. _Cornus florida_. They cut them all down and I was like “Fucking _why_ , you know? Like why not just build around it?”  
  
“It’s so weird we’ve both been here our whole lives, and never even…”  
  
Sam looks at her.  
  
“Do you believe in fate?” Brigitte asks.  
  
Sam wants to give her something, something good, after that story, after everything that’s happened to her.  
  
“No,” he says, softly. Because he won’t lie.  
  
She smiles at him, tight, sad. “Me neither.”  
  
“What do you believe in?” he asks her.  
  
She furrows her brow, then shrugs a shoulder. “Work? The result directly relates to the effort put in.”  
  
“Cause and effect.”  
  
“Yeah. Like maybe if you don’t get the result you want, you didn’t try hard enough. Or something.”  
  
“There’s also a factor of only doing the best you can do in an impossible situation. You can’t know the answers if you’re doing something for the first time.”  
  
“I knew what I was doing.”  
  
“…Do you regret it?”  
  
“I regret… not getting the cure sooner.”  
  
“You couldn’t know. _I_ couldn’t know.”  
  
“Just… we came _so close_.”  
  
“Maybe,” Sam says. “Yeah, maybe.”  
  
Brigitte takes a deep breath and meets his eyes. “So you have depression?”  
  
Okay, so she’s changing the subject. This is how she works, Sam’s starting to realize. She gathers information in bits and pieces, and then they come together in her head. She’s going to come to terms with it, eventually. He lets it drop.  
  
“Not Major Depression,” Sam tells her. “That’s what my dad had. It’s uh… dysthymia. Low grade. Chronic. It gets worse in the winter when work slows down and there’s not a lot to do around here. Lack of sun and fresh air and… you know. Like everyone, I guess, but… persistent.”  
  
“Like, debilitating?”  
  
Sam sighs. “Sometimes.”  
  
“Are you taking medication?”  
  
Sam laughs, softly. “Yeah.” He points to the table, the bong, the rolling papers.  
  
She gives him a look. “You know what I mean.”  
  
“I’m trying to find something that’s a cure for it. Like treating the root cause, not just the symptoms.”  
  
“You mean the Black Orchid?”  
  
“Yeah. You remembered. I guess it kind of fell by the wayside there for a while.”  
  
“Sorry,” she says, softly.  
  
“Not your fault.”

**BRIGITTE**

Brigitte finishes her coffee, and then she asks, “Do you like this place?”  
  
“Yeah. Well. Fuck. Sometimes. I like being near the plants. It’s complicated, I don’t know. It’s so controlled here. Like— so. Sheltered. Unaffected by the world outside. Temperature-regulated and shit. Watered on a schedule.”  
  
“So, what?” she asks, smiling a little. “You just want to live in the woods?”  
  
“I thought about it, actually,” Sam says. “Go to… the U.S. or something. See the redwoods…”  
  
“That’s far.”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
He coffee’s not as warm as it was, she turns the cup in her hands. “I’ve never been out of Ontario.”  
  
“I’ve been to Montreal,” Sam offers.  
  
“How was it?”  
  
“Um. French.”  
  
She laughs, genuine smile, and she catches the way he looks at her when she does. It makes her feel very fucking visible.  
  
“Oh, Jesus,” Sam says, suddenly, sitting up. “It’s Christmas. Fuck.”  
  
She’d totally forgotten.  
  
“We have… zero food. Nothing’s going to be open.”  
  
“That’s not true,” Brigitte says. “There’s a diner in town that’s open 365 days a year. Henry brought us there the year Pamela was visiting with our grandmother.”  
  
“Well aren’t you just a wealth of information. …Is it good?”  
  
She shrugs.  
  
He looks skeptical. “Okay,” he finally agrees. “You know how to get there?”  
  
She shrugs, nods.  
  
“Just let me shower,” he tells her, grabbing some clothes and then disappearing into the bathroom.  
  
When the water starts, she gets up, gets dressed. She feels sort of like her clothes don’t fit her anymore. Like they don’t suit her, and she doesn’t know why. It’s just that she puts them on, and she doesn’t really feel like herself. Some lace is hanging from the bottom of her skirt and she reaches down and pulls it free, rips the whole lace hem from the bottom, balling it up in her hands. It’s left the bottom of her skirt frayed, but it’s not that noticeable.  
  
She thinks about yesterday. About Pamela who’s going to spend the next twenty years in prison. She thinks about kissing Sam. She thinks about how, besides Ginger, she’s never found it this easy to talk to someone else.  
  
He emerges dressed, hair wet, and they get their jackets and go. Every radio station is Christmas music, and eventually they just leave it playing. It takes a while to get to town. Sam takes the back roads because the highway stresses her out. She never said anything, but he must have noticed, somehow. He never said anything either, just stopped taking the highway places when she’s with him. She notices.  
  
They’re just quiet on the drive, and she thinks about that, too. How he’s easy to talk to, but how the silences can be easy, too, when there’s not all this tension between them. She likes that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Several lines of dialogue, ideas, and bits of narrative are pulled directly from one of the later Ginger Snaps scripts written by Karen Walton and John Fawcett. They are bits and pieces that didn't make their way into the film, and I do not take credit for them, but I really wanted to find a place to fit them back into Brigitte and Sam's journey; so they're scattered throughout.


	5. Chapter 5

**BRIGITTE**

She likes that, but she thinks, maybe, it’s like the tide, because the tension just builds again, later. Worse the next time around. At first she liked Sam like a crush. Back when he was someone she didn’t know, and it was forgettable and, therefore, easy. Just a really good face that she barely had a name to put to.  
  
Now it’s different. Now she knows him. Now, she’s kissed him, she’s slept in his arms. And sometimes thinking about that hurts because it makes her different than she was— different than she was supposed to be. Sometimes that means she feels guilty, but more often than not, it’s a kind of salvation, because even if she doesn’t feel like she really knows the girl who shares his bed and can look him in the eye, she still feels like she’s gained something. It means she’s still moving forward, by degrees, gaining ground, and that feels important right now, even if she doesn’t know why.  
  
Christmas is quiet. They read, they watch _A Christmas Story_ , which she’s never seen, but Sam seems to be attached to. They get their diner breakfast, and then order more for later, and so Christmas dinner is cold chicken sandwiches and hashbrowns, followed by apple pie, and Sam says “I bet this is the worst Christmas you ever had,” and she’s honest when she says “It’s not.”  
  
A storm blows in. It howls around the windows and rattles the heavy plastic tarp that protects the glass roofs of the greenhouses out font. Sam’s room feels very small against the onslaught, but also very safe. The heater rattles with the effort to heat the room, but Sam always turns it way down at night because the hydro bill is like a second rent otherwise. It falls silent as it cools, and they’re left with just the wind as they get into bed, hoping to get warm before the room gets cold. It’s early still but Christmas, Brigitte thinks, is always one of those strange days that feels weirdly long. She has no idea what time it is, but it’s midnight-dark outside by five p.m. anyway.  
  
She tells Sam about winter solstice, even though she thinks he probably knows. He listens to her anyway, doesn’t try to bombard her with more information just to show that he knows something, too. She likes that. Because maybe she’s just talking for something to do with this closeness, this space in the bed between them that didn’t exist last night, but mostly, there is something about anticipating the return of the sun on the longest night of the year that she likes.  
  
When she runs out of words, Sam still doesn’t speak. She can see him, barely. The line of his cheek in the darkness. He’s been watching her, she thinks, even though she’s had her eyes, unseeing, on the small space between them, her spine pressed lightly against the wall at her back.  
  
“I like the way you think,” he tells her, finally breaking the stillness.  
  
“Some people say I’m a know it all,” she counters.  
  
“You are. But in a good way. You’re smart, Brigitte. Hang onto that.”  
  
She slides her ring finger past her lips and chews on a hangnail until it’s soft enough to pull off, but it tears sharply into her skin anyway. She’s a lot of things besides smart, not all of them good.  
  
“Why’d you say you didn’t think of me… like, that way?” She sucks at the pain, the salt of her skin against her tongue slightly bitter.  
  
“When?”  
  
“When Ginger came here? When you told me about the monkshood?  
  
“Oh yeah,” he says, like he’s remembering something he wishes he didn’t. “Shit, I don’t know, Brigitte, because she insinuated I was a rapist? Because you’d just started to look me in the eyes when you spoke? That felt like a big deal…”  
  
“Did you actually like me, then? Is that the only reason you helped?”  
  
“You were interesting.”  
  
“Because you thought I was infected. It made you care.”  
  
“Yeah, and because you showed up from nowhere talking about biology and lycanthropes. You were different. But you were trying awfully hard to be invisible.”  
  
And she can’t argue with that.  
  
Sam pushes himself up onto one elbow so he’s facing her, but looking down at her now. He blocks the dark expanse of room behind him — a closer darkness, warmer. “I don’t even know if you like me.”  
  
“I thought I was pretty clear…”  
  
“—that you noticed me. That I'm your friend.”  
  
She furrows her brow, slides her thumb over the missing hangnail, feeling the soft sting of the cut. “I don’t know how this works? But...” she says. “Why can’t it be both?”  
  
“Can’t it?”

**SAM**

Sam can see how this could start going in circles, but then she says:  
  
“I’d rather be your friend than anything else. Like if it’s a choice.”  
  
His heart sinks to the vicinity of his stomach, and somehow slams against his throat at the same time. He grapples for something to say that’s both an agreement as well as honest and isn’t sure how to continue.  
  
She continues for him. “ ‘Cause… that makes it easier. For you to stay.”  
  
“Says who?”  
  
“Well, it’s not like you have a great track record.”  
  
“Gee, thanks.”  
  
“Sorry.”  
  
Silence settles, and Sam isn’t sure what to do. If he should get up to make the bed on the floor, or if being friends means they can still share a bed. Maybe it means something else entirely, and he’s not grasping it.  
  
“I do like you,” she says, her voice somewhere between a whisper and not. “Like so much it’s hard to look at you sometimes, but then I think— like, that that’s not fair. I don’t know how people do this. How do people… know. Like, when they can touch someone? How—” she takes a strange breath, like she’s shivering, but Sam doesn’t reach out to check. “Sometimes I just find all of that so… like I’m built wrong… like I’m going to be… like, messed up somehow.”  
  
“Why?” Sam asks, but she goes quiet. He can’t even hear her breathing. “Brigitte…?”  
  
She sits up suddenly, her hands at her throat, her chest. Sam follows her. She’s freaking, and he’s trying not to. He slides his hand between her shoulder blades, rubs her back, then pulls away like maybe he shouldn’t touch her. Hadn’t she just been saying…?  
  
But she reaches for him, catches him at the elbow and holds on so tight, and Sam… Sam remembers what a panic attack feels like. He doesn’t want hers to be because of him.  
  
“Hey, hey, hey. Hey, Brigitte, shh.”  
  
He lets her cling to him and shifts around a little so he can touch her face. Her knee is jammed into his shin painfully, but he doesn’t pull back. “It’ll pass, promise, just breathe slow. Slow, slow… There you go.”  
  
She coughs, but she’s breathing again. She draws away from him enough to jam her fists into her eyes, leaving them there as she gasps. He lets her go, just sits with her, watching, thinking _poor fucking thing._  
  
She sniffles — not like crying, but like — thought maybe you were dying. He watches her lift the neck of her shirt and use it to wipe her nose and he laughs a little, just a way to shake some of his own tension free, and touches her hair — just passes his hand over it, once.  
  
“When Henry renovated the basement, to build our room… I was like ten, and in the way or whatever. And he rammed me with this beam, right in my stomach. It was an accident. But all the air came out of my lungs at once and I kept trying to breathe, but I couldn’t. I forgot all about that. ’Til like right now.”  
  
“I used to get those. Panic attacks.”  
  
“Fantastic,” Brigitte says, all sarcasm.  
  
“Hey, though,” Sam says. “What’re you scared of?”  
  
She doesn't look at him, goes still as the silence stretches long between them. “That you’ll leave.”  
  
“I won’t.”  
  
“You can’t know that.”  
  
“No, but I can make a pretty good guess.”  
  
“I don’t want to be a drag. I don’t want to be. Disappointing.”  
  
“You’re not, you won’t. Hey. Stop that. Let’s take this one step at a time, you’re miles ahead, here.”  
  
“I feel like that’s where everyone else is. You _know_ this. And I’m like…”  
  
“I wasn’t born knowing it. Look, it’s not as organic as everyone thinks. I just… we can put the brakes on. Any time. I’m easy.”  
  
“See, it’s fucked, ‘cause I don’t want to. I… everything so far is good. I like it, but then it’s like I hit this wall in my head, and…”  
  
“That’s okay. That’s _okay_. Seriously, I swear.”  
  
“It feels like I’m a tease.”  
  
“Well, you’re fucking not.”  
  
“I don’t get how to be the one to reach out. How does anyone just do that?”  
  
Sam breathes a gentle laugh through his nose. “You just… it’s whatever you want. You just gotta do it. Shit, Brigitte, you think _I’m_ not scared? You’ve just found yourself another weird loner — I’m not exactly a people person. Just…  you can kiss me any time you want. Please, seriously, anything. Please, kiss me.”  
  
She laughs, all breath, shaky like she’s all but overcome, but he thinks the laugh is genuine. “…’kay,” she whispers, but she doesn’t kiss him. He can’t say he’s surprised.  
  
“You okay?”  
  
“Think so.”  
  
“Okay.”  
  
Sam leans forward, says “shh,” when she tenses, like she’s scrambling to figure out what to do. He kisses her hair, just above her temple and, finally, feels her relax.  
  
She falls asleep with her fingers tangled in the front of his shirt, and he thinks how he’s already followed her to hell and back once and, fuck, he’d do it again. He would absolutely do it again.

**BRIGITTE**

It is so hard to have these conversations. Trying to get her words around a concept she’s barely even thought about, isn’t even sure if she wants. She doesn’t understand how sex can intrigue and repulse her all at once. She doesn’t understand how three months ago, she never would have considered it, whether Sam had noticed her or not. Because she still would have had Ginger.  
  
She does know that when Sam held her thigh, standing between her legs the other night, that she ached for something more, but when she thinks back to it, the ache feels alien and unnerving.  
  
It didn’t at the time. She doesn’t know what to do with it, afterwards, but the unsettled feeling comes from herself, her own traitorous flesh. Not from Sam, who has only ever made sure she kept her head above water.  
  
Sometimes she thinks that maybe some part of her did die back in her old bedroom. That she lost something else, too, besides a sister, but she doesn’t know what.  
  
She senses that that thing is long gone in Sam, too, so maybe it’s not bad to lose it. Whatever it is.  
  
Sam. His name feels like home in her mouth (which is why she never says it) but not the way Ginger’s did. It’s different, but still safe. A safe name. A safe place. Sam’s hair is too long, and curls around his ears, sweetly, and when she thinks about how much she wanted to kiss him last night — when he said _Please, kiss me_ , she gets that ache again, filling up that negative space in the hollow of her belly. She was too scared to, of course. She would have felt stupid, anyway, doing it right then. Over-dramatic, predictable. She wonders what she seems like to him, and hopes she’s not a pain.  
  
She feels like it. Fevers, panic attacks. She’s been sad or angry or quiet more often than she’s anything else. Like she’s got these walls she’s built so high that even she’s forgotten how to take them down, and isn’t even sure if she should.  
  
But she thinks that maybe she has to.  
  
She gets up before he wakes up, feeling too on edge to have him awake and close and —... When he touches her now, it's like he’s trying to reach her, like he _wants_ to, but they’re always too brief, too soft. She wonders if maybe she doesn’t think about the things she wants because they scare her.  
  
In the shower, with the water running, she thinks about Sam’s hands on her thigh and in her hair and beneath the hot water she gets that same ache, but when she slides her hand between her legs, pressing, then finally, frustrated, pushing inside to all that muscle and heat, she gets the same gut-sick feeling she does before she passes out because it feels so wrong — like a painless wound. Like a bruise, without the tenderness.  
  
She washes her hands beneath the shower stream and breathes deeply, her forehead against the tiled wall, until the feeling fades.  
  
She definitely is messed up inside. Ginger wasn’t. Not even before she was infected. Brigitte remembers pretending to sleep through the way Ginger’s breathing edged faster and shallower and sharper. Through the softest creaking of her mattress. She remembers turning up the TV when Ginger’s baths ran too long.  
  
And for Brigitte. Touching herself, it’s always been… just: ‘ _What?_ ’ The ache comes and then goes and leaves her empty. She feels like there are two parts of herself, and one of them is a liar, but she doesn’t know which one.  
  
She wonders if Sam will ever figure that out. She wonders if he’ll hate her for it, because no matter what he says to her, how good he is, she’s always got the narrative of her whole life in the back of her mind. _That’s what men want… they’re all pretty much the same._  
  
And Brigitte _wishes_ that she didn’t give a shit about what Sam wants. But she totally does. It’s like…  
  
_Kinda like you’re just looking for someone else to latch onto, Beebster, huh?_  
  
Ginger’s voice floats to her just beneath the sound of the water running, and Brigitte keeps her eyes shut, willing her sister back to life through something that isn’t even actually happening.  
  
She knows that.  
  
_You’re just like a leech, just feeding off of other people until they’re a husk… and you bleed._  
  
Brigitte gasps, eyes opening to the room, the shower. She’s alone, of course. She pushes the shower curtain aside, catches her reflection in the mirror, half-blurred with steam, but there’s no one else here.  
  
Brigitte blinks until her head clears. She reaches out and shuts the water off.

**SAM**

When he wakes up, the water is running and Brigitte is gone. He gets up only long enough to grab his rolling papers and a bag of weed, and then gets back into bed again, using a book to roll the joint on.  
  
He’s halfway through it by the time she emerges. He sits up a little. “Hey.”  
  
“Hey,” she says, hovering in the middle of the room for a moment before she comes and sits on the foot of the bed.  
  
“Did you sleep okay?”  
  
“Fine. Why?”  
  
“You look pale,” he tells her.  
  
She averts her eyes. “I’m okay.”  
  
Sam watches her through a haze of pot smoke. “Liar,” he tells her.  
  
She shrugs.  
  
“That’s okay. You don’t have to tell me.”  
  
“You’re smoking that really early. Are you okay?”  
  
Sam regards her quietly, then says. “I will be, after this joint.”

**BRIGITTE**

The phone rings, startling them both. He gets up, clearing his throat before he answers. He always answers it “County Regreening,” because no one else ever calls.  
  
She watches him write down an order, and her chest feels tight and she doesn’t know why.  
  
He makes coffee for them both, and goes out shortly after to the greenhouses, cigarette between his lips, a hearty shot of rye in his steaming cup. She doesn’t know what to do with her sudden solitude, so she buries herself in her schoolwork, surrounding herself with her bag and her books and her binder.  
  
It occurs to her, later, that she hates being alone, but maybe Sam does, too. Maybe he’s just more used to it. Or maybe he uses it the same way he uses the alcohol, the copious cigarettes.  
  
She sighs, then wrestles the coffee machine on again.

**SAM**

Sam is working way down at the end of the greenhouse, dividing and repotting some things for the order. He’s wearing fingerless gloves, because this isn’t a hothouse. Fuck, he _wishes_ he could afford one of those. Bromeliads and African Violets in bloom in the dead of Winter in Ontario? Imagine.  
  
He hears the door to his room open, but doesn’t look up. Brigitte sets another cup of coffee down at his side, steaming hot, and he eases a little, tension he didn’t even know he was holding dropping from his shoulders. He doesn’t know what’s wrong with him. He’s not angry or frustrated with her, but he can feel something’s off. Off with her, with them. Off in his fucking head.  
  
“Thank you,” he says, softly.  
  
She doesn’t respond, but she’s lingering, watching him work, but it doesn’t bother him. He’s surprised, though, when she reaches out and takes his sleeve, holding on long enough to stop him reaching for his spade.  
  
He looks up at her, questioning, and she kisses him. It surprises him enough that he makes a sound. Like: _oh_.  
  
Her mouth is the warmest thing he’s touching, and it makes him realize how cold the rest of the room is. He thinks about the heat of her neck beneath her hair, thinks about getting his fingers there to warm them.  
  
The angle is awkward, because, standing, she’s taller than him in the plastic folding chair he’s brought out to work. On a whim, he twists his arm against her hold on his sleeve and tugs her, this want building in him, trying to get her closer, pulling her down onto his lap.  
  
She tenses, resisting, and he lets her go immediately. She steps back and into the low wall of crumbing brick he’s placed around the planter. She loses her balance a little, sitting down hard. “Whoa,” he says, “you’re okay.”  
  
She huffs this half-embarrased laugh and looks away. “Just. Wait.” She struggles for a moment, then asks “...What's going on?”  
  
“Sorry,” Sam says, feeling awkward suddenly. He picks up the coffee she brought out and takes a drink. It’s good — more cream than he normally puts in so it feels heavy, substantial. The mug is warm and he clings to it. “This isn’t… ‘cause of you.” he tells her. “I’m just feeling like the weather and stuff is getting to me, this morning.” He watches her grinding quarter moons with the toe of her boot into the dirt floor with this quiet, intent focus before she looks up at him, a little too unguarded.  
  
“…Promise?”  
  
“I swear.”  
  
She takes a breath, relaxing a little, then nods.  
  
“What about you?” Sam asks. “You don't wanna talk?”  
  
She shakes her head.  
  
“You gonna be okay, though?”  
  
She looks up at him again. “Trying.”  


**BRIGITTE**

_You’re like a leech…_  
  
Well, maybe she was, with Ginger. Maybe that’s why Ginger got so sick of her. But it doesn’t have to be that way.  
  
“I wanna get a job,” she says, holding his eyes. “I want to help.”  
  
Sam looks away, fingering the thin stalks of the plants he repotting. “You’re already doing school,” he says.  
  
She shrugs. “I don’t want you to pay for everything. For my stuff.”  
  
“I don’t mind.”  
  
“Look, we agreed that that guardianship stuff was all just on paper, so that we could beat the system, change my school.” She’s speaking carefully, trying to get this out in the way that she means it. “And right now you’re paying for double the food, double the electricity…”  
  
“Hardly double,” Sam says. He’s studying her, too long. She does her best not to cave beneath it, because she wants this. “But, yeah,” he says, finally. “Sure, whatever. Condition?”  
  
She narrows her eyes at him. “What?”  
  
“I’m telling you this as friends,” Sam says, “Don’t sacrifice your plans for some part-time job. You still graduate early, because that’s what you wanna do. Right? So, if they want you to work extra, tell them no. Or quit, whatever.”  
  
And somehow it gets to her that he actually remembers what she said, that he gives a shit about all that other stuff she wants to do. “Okay, deal.”

**SAM**

“Good,” he says, and that seems like it should be the end of it, as he sets his cup down near her hip, but he's fighting back something that’s worrying at a little back corner of his mind. “Hey, you wanna go for a drive, later?” he asks. “Help me deliver these?”  
  
“Okay.” She slides off the wall, close, her boots between his. He leans back to give her space, but she doesn’t take it, she stays close.  
  
“This isn’t ‘cause I’m trying to get away from here,” she says. “Or you. I just… I’m starting to feel like a burden, or something. That’s all.”  
  
And just like that, the feeling fades. Sam swallows, looking up at her, something determined almost hiding the anxiousness on her face. “You're not a burden. But yeah, I get it, Brigitte. So, thanks.”  
  
She turns, stepping around his leg, her skirt brushing heavily against him, and makes her way back inside.  
  
“Good kiss,” Sam half-calls out, eyes on his plants. She half turns back, but doesn’t stop. He hears the door to his room shut and he smiles hard.

**BRIGITTE**

She shuts herself in the room again, her heart beating like she’s been running, but it’s a good feeling. Not like being chased, but like running because you can. Like running through that storm at the lake one summer, when she and Ginger were little. Everyone on the beach had scattered, collecting blankets, coolers, small children. Sunbathing girls screaming and dashing for their cars, and she and Ginger running wildly together through the downpour while Pamela shouted ineffectually at them to hurry back to the car, kicking lake water at each other, screaming with overwhelming, childlike joy, with laugher.  
  
She hasn’t felt like that in a while. It’s not quite the same, it’s contained. Just this bright place in her chest that’s felt so dark.  
  
_Good kiss._  
  
She’s starting to think that maybe feelings can sit in the same places, but still be different. Like a slideshow. All the images are still there, they just don’t all have to be seen at the same time to exist. Maybe liking Sam doesn’t have to push Ginger out, like she was always told that it would.  
  
Anyway, nothing can come between them now. When Brigitte reaches out for Ginger, she’s not met with a wall, or a wolf, or a boy, or prison bars: only empty air.  
  
And Brigitte has no idea what could ever possibly come between her and that, because the loss of Ginger, it engulfs her, it holds her _so_ close it’s settled into her skin.  
  
~*  
  
As soon as school’s back in, the first week of January, Brigitte finds a job doing overnight shelving at the local library, and she wrangles something with her school to get her obligatory thirty hours of community involvement volunteer hours she needs to graduate. She’ll get there at 4:30, right after classes, work until 9 p.m. when they close, and then get paid to do shelving work from 9 until midnight when the night janitor locks up and leaves. It’s three times a week. She gets paid seven dollars an hour. It’s a little over two hundred dollars a month and she’ll be done community involvement by the end of February.  
  
She hopes it’s enough. She can tell that Sam thinks it’s too much, but he doesn’t say it. He just tells her “Don’t fucking walk home by yourself, I’ll drive you,” because they’re both a little afraid of the night, now.  
  
The first cheque she cashes, Sam won’t take from her, even when she holds it out to him over the table where he’s weighing bags of weed. School’s back in session, it’s dealing season again.  
  
“I’m not taking your first paycheque.”  
  
She keeps holding it out. All those twenties, fresh from the ATM. Sam tries to ignore her, but she’s the one who had a sister. She’s better at these games. Eventually he tips his chair back to look at her. She wins.  
  
“Keep this one. Next time give me forty and we’ll call it even.”  
  
“That’s not even groceries.”  
  
“Sixty then.”  
  
That’s just under half. She chews on her lip, considering. “What if I buy weed from you?”  
  
He laughs. “And do what with it, fuckin’ scatter it to the wind? I’m not letting you waste perfectly good pot.”  
  
“I could sell it.”  
  
“No you couldn’t,” Sam says, and goes right back to his scales. He’s not even going to debate this one, and she has to admit that it’s a shit idea anyway.  
  
Brigitte takes a breath. “Just take sixty now.”  
  
“No. That’s your first paycheque, Brigitte, you’ve got to blow it on stupid shit you don’t need before society requires you to blow it on stupid shit you do.”  
  
She pulls a face, twisting her mouth, then slides it back into her skirt pocket. Maybe there is something she needs…  
  
~*  
  
She can’t do the mall. All those lights and people and smells. It’s horrific. That’s what she tells herself until she remembers that there’s literally nowhere else in Bailey Downs to get clothes.  
  
She goes early in the morning when it’s just her, the old people doing slow, endless laps past the store fronts to get their exercise somewhere warm, and the teenage moms who, like Brigitte, seem to feel like they’d rather not be seen by huge crowds of people.  
  
She buys things she’s needed for a while: what she brought to Sam’s wasn’t even half of her clothes, and who knows where they are now, and then she buys something that will make her a little more invisible than the heavy skirts she wears. Pants in dark colours: black and brown. Something she can wear to work and to school to blend into the background. They fit, that’s really all that matters. She does catch her reflection in the mirror in the dressing room, though, and it gives her pause. She feels like she doesn’t quite recognize herself without the wool and the lace of the skirt she’s flung over the changing stool, but she doesn’t not like it, either.  
  
She looks taller, maybe, or maybe it’s just because the pants don’t cut her off mid-calf. Uncertain, she runs her hands down over them, tugging at the fabric where it hangs loosely over non-existent hips. She wrinkles her nose, uncertainly, then yanks the hem of her sweater further down and turns away.  
  
~*  
  
January passes in a blur of work and school and Sam. Sam’s hands, fingernails dark with soil: holding the wildflower playing cards, catching the strobing of the streetlights as he drives her home from work, rolling the joint she took her first ever hit off of (she coughed a lot. It didn’t work). Sam’s hands on her hands, and her face, and her hair.  
  
And Brigitte realizes that minimum-wage work gets old really fast. She’s a girl, so of course the library puts her up at the front during opening hours. She’s already asked the manager twice (a middle-aged, balding man with more self-importance than his position’s worth) to put her back to do inventory with the shy, Pakistani guy who has only ever said “hi” and “ ‘night,” to her and who once offered to share part of his dinner, when she forgot to bring hers on the first day.  
  
Of course, she’s refused, and so she tries to be the one who types things or searches things or brings customers to the proper sections just so that she doesn’t have to smile and have the same conversation about the weather or Dan Brown’s _Angels & Demons_, with every single fucking person who walks through the front doors. She watches the hours between 4:30 and 9 pass agonizingly slowly.  
  
Sometimes she lingers longer than she should in the aisles, browsing books that interest her. Folklore, Art, Psychological disorders. She brings home books on Botany for Sam.  
  
It’s a Friday night, half an hour before closing time, and she’s trying to look busy with the holds so that she doesn’t have to check out anyone else’s books when she hears a familiar voice. She looks up sharply, her stomach flooding with that sick, primal fear of so many social-reject-kids in school.  
  
Jason McCardy’s three aisles down talking to someone deeper in the row that she can’t see. She freezes. Too long. He turns towards the checkout desk and their eyes meet, and his face does something she really doesn’t like. She makes a split second decision and bolts in the direction of the women’s bathrooms because he can’t follow her in there.  
  
She makes the corridor, but he bursts from the rows between her and the bathroom doorway and all she remembers, in a flash, is him holding her up against the store cabinet, all sharp teeth and hard, pressing hands that left bruises. He might not be a wolf anymore, but he’s still stronger.  
  
She turns and flees, slamming through the exit to the stairs and taking them down, because she knows you can get out to the parking lot that way. She’s halfway down when the door crashes into the wall behind her.  
  
“Hey!”  
  
She stumbles and hits the concrete floor hard with her knees, and he leaps down the last of the steps, almost on top of her. She screams, and then his hand is over her mouth. Viciously, she bites him, struggling, shoving at him with her hands in fists, and he yelps and backs right off.  
  
She backs into the wall at the bottom of the stairs hard, peeling paint beneath her fingernails. Jason’s inspecting his palm, but then he looks back up at her and raises his hands, submissive. She watches as blood wells up and sluices down his wrist and they are both breathing hard and fast.  
  
“H— hang on,” he says. “I just… ah, _fuck_ , Fitzgerald.” He looks at his bleeding hand again, and his eyes are dark with fear. “Fuck… _tell me_ you don’t have it.” His voice cracks.  
  
She spits his blood out onto the concrete, then spits a couple more times for good measure. “Have what?” she bites out.  
  
“The— the fucking— _disease_ , the—”  
  
The curse.  
  
Brigitte swallows. “I don’t have it. What the fuck do you want?”  
  
Jason shuts his eyes for a second, the relief apparently too much. When he opens them, he’s breathing slower. “I want to talk to you… fuck, man, I— I thought you two'd be long gone.” His eyes slide over her, her navy blue turtle-neck, her cargo pants. He looks perplexed. She almost feels sorry for him.  
  
“Shit. You look different.”  
  
On second thought, no she doesn't. “Yeah, well, you still look like a dickhead,” she snarks, surprising herself.  
  
His mouth drops open.  
  
“Are you going to tell me what you want, or not? I’m working, here.”  
  
“What I w—” he steps forward and she forces herself to straighten up, in spite of every single thing inside of her telling her to cower, to shrink into herself. It stops him, but he’s closer than she wants him to be. “What I _want_? Have you been here, these last few months, Fitz, ‘cause it’s been a shit show.”  
  
“It shouldn’t be. You’re cured.”  
  
“Look, all I know is that Ginger gave something to me, and then you jabbed me with some fucking— mystery substance. So. Yeah. I guess you _could_ say that I really _would_ like to know _what the fuck was happening to me._ ”  
  
“Figure it out yourself,” she tells him.  
  
“No,” he tells her, “You know why? Because I tried. And it felt like I was going goddamn insane.”  
  
“Look, I can’t help you,” Brigitte says, inching towards the stairs.  
  
“How’m I s’posed to fuckin’ research something so fucking nuts, huh?!” Jason asks. “I fucking killed my dog, I had— extra teeth coming in alongside these ones, like a goddamn shark.”  
  
“ _Shh_ ,” Brigitte hisses, “Shut up, someone’s going to hear you!”  
  
“All right, fuck you, I just— let me talk to Ginger, all right?”  
  
Brigitte clenches her jaw hard, shaking with adrenaline or residual fear. Or something else. “Well, you can’t,” she says.  
  
“You fucking bitch,” Jason says, incredulous. “I just want to _talk_ to her!”  
  
“You come in here again?” Brigitte says, “And I’ll make sure you don’t even have a mouth to talk with.”  
  
She turns and goes back up the steps, leaving him there.

**SAM**

She’s really quiet on the drive home when he asks her if she’s okay, she shrugs and says she’s fine. It’s only later, when she comes out of the bathroom dressed in shorts and one of his shirts for bed that he hisses sharply and says “ _Jesus_ , Brigitte.” Her knees are a mess, bruised and scraped to shit. “What the hell happened?”  
  
She sighs, sitting down heavily on the bed. It takes her a long moment to collect herself, but then she says: “Okay, so you know Jason McCardy?”  
  
Of course he does, he sells him weed. Sam feels a sick swoop in his gut, all fear, but as she speaks, it’s followed fast by white hot anger.  
  
“I didn’t know what to say,” she finishes. “I just… I couldn’t tell him.”  
  
Sam bites his lip, looking away from her, furious with this fucking McCardy kid. “He sounds like he’s still infected.”  
  
“That’s just how he is,” Brigitte says. “He looked fine. He freaked when I bit him because he thought maybe I gave it to him again.”  
  
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Sam says. “What does he want?”  
  
“I dunno. Confirmation, maybe, that it was real? Or like… maybe just someone to help him cope.” She shrugs up at him. “He probably won’t come back again.”  
  
“Yeah, if he does, I’ll kill him.”  
  
She tips her chin down, looking at him from under her brows. “Are you seriously being jealous?”  
  
“Wrong word,” Sam says.  
  
“Well, I basically told him I’d rip his mouth out of his face if I saw him there again.”  
  
Sam breathes a sigh through his nose. “He hurt you, Brigitte.”  
  
“He’s scared.”  
  
“That’s not a reason.”  
  
She goes quiet for a moment, then says “I know that.”  
  
~*  
  
She falls asleep with her homework beside her on the bed, and Sam carefully sits down beside her. He glances down at her looseleaf essay. It’s for an AP English class. Brigitte has written about John Stuart Mill’s _On Liberty: Of Individuality as One of the Elements of Well-Being._ His eyes linger over a quote she’s chosen. “ _Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing._ ”  
  
Tucked against her hip is the coil-bound collection of texts they’re reading for the class. It’s folded open to a unit on the Romantics and, halfway down the page, Brigitte’s written over the printed font with her light blue pen, making the words look like a tilt-card, turned halfway between one picture and the next. Sam pulls it closer, turning it towards himself so he can read it. It’s just one verse from Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’  
  
_My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains_  
_My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,_  
_Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains_  
_One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:_  
_’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,_  
_But being too happy in thine happiness,—_  
_That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,_  
_In some melodious plot_  
_Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,_  
_Singst of summer in full-throated ease._  
  
Sam touches the page, feels the indents where the pen has pressed down to trace the words. Hemlock. _Conum maculatum_.  
  
Sam looks up at her, hard asleep. He wonders what happens when she graduates. Will she leave this place? Someone like her is wasted here, Sam thinks. But it’s not up to him.  
  
He collects her things, piles them carefully on the TV table. He starts turning off lights, and she stirs like she always does. She doesn’t apologize this time, though, that he’s had to clear her stuff, and he climbs onto the bed sitting crosslegged at the foot of it. She rolls onto her back and pushes her hair out of her face, squinting in the light from the bedside lamp.  
  
“Hey,” she says, pushing herself up onto her elbows, bending her knees to make space for him at the end of the bed. Her voice is soft with sleep.

**BRIGITTE**

“Hey,” he answers, and reaches out to touch her bare shin with the backs of his fingers. She stills, curious, and lets him, but she’s watching his eyes rather than his fingers. He’s looking at her bruised knees, and he twists his wrist to brush over the bruises gently. It doesn’t hurt, but she shivers anyway, the anticipation of pain.  
  
She’s fully awake now, and the path of Sam’s hand stills and he looks up at her. He presses his thumb against the tendon at the back of her knee. “What’re you thinking?” he asks her.  
  
She has to collect her thoughts, make them into words. “That… you don’t have to be so careful.”  
  
Sam blinks quickly and looks down. He draws away, and her body floods with disappointment. But then he lies down beside her, braced on his elbow, and close, searching. He touches her shoulder and kindles this warm trail down the inside of her left arm to her scarred palm. He passes his index along it.  
  
“Why do you do that?” she asks.  
  
“…It’s part of you, I guess.”  
  
She watches his face, but he’s looking down at their hands, toying with her rings, making them straight where they’ve twisted on her fingers.  
  
“Do you think I should have listened to you? On Halloween?”  
  
“I have this feeling that things would have gone a lot worse if you had.”  
  
She pulls a face like she isn’t so sure, but maybe. She lets him guide her hand back a little so that he can press his palm against it, measuring his fingers against hers, everything about it languorous, slow. It’s bigger than hers, his fingers broader, stronger. She presses, just a little, to test him, to give back. He meets her eyes and oh, god, she feels that at the centre of her. She twists against it, biting her lip.  
  
And she remembers walking up to the door of this very room that night.  
  
_Ginger, get off me!_  
  
_Jerk._  
  
_What? I_ told _you to stop._  
  
“Hey,” she says. “What happened before I got there?”  
  
Something shifts. A muscle in Sam’s forearm jumps and she feels the jolt against her palm.  
  
He rolls his neck a little, dropping his head to rub his forehead with his free hand. “I, um… she—” it dangles there for a moment, that pronoun, and then he switches. “I kissed her.”  
  
_I knew it_ , Brigitte thinks, everything in her going horribly tight. Of course she fucking knew, she just needed the confirmation. Ginger could never let her have anything just to herself, unless she thought it wasn’t worth her time.  
  
“I’m not— tryin’a make excuses, but it was a lot. Brigitte. I mean, you saw her.” He moves to pull away, but she grabs his hand hard and doesn’t let him and he takes this breath that she hears shake from somewhere way deep inside of him. “I didn’t mean to.”  
  
“Why?” Brigitte asks.  
  
“I dunno. She kissed me, I kissed her back. And then I told her to stop.”

**SAM**

Brigitte looks away. It’s almost an eye-roll, but then she just takes in the room, everything but him. She doesn’t let him go, though.  
  
“Did you like her?”  
  
“I barely knew her.”  
  
“Did you like it,” she clarifies.  
  
“I kinda thought she was about to rip my throat out.” Sam digs at his eye with his free hand. “So. No. Not really. ...But. I was curious, I guess.” He looks up again, and it takes her a second, but she looks at him.  
  
“What did she say about me?” she asks, and he doesn’t even need to ask how she knows.  
  
And he doesn’t want to tell her, because it’ll hurt her. He searches for the gentlest way to say it.  
  
“No, actually. Just forget it,” Brigitte says. “I don’t want to know.”  
  
Sam tries not to exhale his relief, because then she’ll know how much there is. She sighs in his stead, letting it go, and he wonders how long she’s been holding onto that one. The conversation ends and they are left with the clicking of the heater, which Sam forgot to turn down, fuck. She hears it, too.  
  
“I’ll get it,” she tells him, and she moves to sit up and climb over him. He closes his fingers messily around hers, not hard, just a reluctance. _Don’t go yet._

**BRIGITTE**

Sam stops her, or tries to. And something about today, about Jason, about the stiffness in her knees, about this conversation, makes her pull away, too hard.

**SAM**

Sam gives in, dropping her hand, rolling onto his back to make it easier for her. She turns the heat down until it clicks, and he pushes the blankets down for them both. He doesn’t move a muscle as she climbs back over him and takes her place between him and the wall. He waits until she’s settled to reach out and flick off the light.


	6. Chapter 6

**SAM**

He misses her, when she’s away at school. It’s why he gets up with her most mornings, has coffee while she reads her textbooks. Sometimes Sam wonders if she doesn’t get enough time by herself. Like maybe he’s driving her crazy because he’s always just there, mornings and lunch in his van (most days, when he can get away from work), but she still walks to and from school by herself, and when he’s home and not out working, he likes the way she comes in smelling like cold winter air.  
  
He tries to keep busy. The winter is a grey one, and it’s not great for the plants. Without sunlight, the greenhouse doesn’t stay warm the way it’s supposed to, and he spends a lot of time wrapping things in burlap.  
  
His weed plants are fine, of course. That’s his main income through the winter months, outside of EI, pre-storm prevention and post-storm clean-up. He shifts his schedule around, goes on the days Brigitte’s working at the library so that he’s keeping busy. And these high school kids, they catch on fast enough. They still wait for him in the parking lot, talking and laughing and practicing the way they’re going to fold their money discreetly. Sam blows into the lot, and he’s still, if he’s honest, not used to not having to ignore Trina. _Hiya, Samuel!_  
  
His dad called him Samuel — he was always the only one, and Sam always wished Trina wouldn’t, but he guesses there was something about it she liked, because she never listened, even when he asked her not to.  
  
McCardy’s there, waiting. His little friends aren’t with him anymore — haven’t been for a while, maybe, and Sam’s somehow never noticed until now. Not really. But then again, he hasn’t been here since before winter break, so who knows. High school’s fucking weird. Sam ignores Jason, makes him wait while he deals to the other kids, and as they all start wandering away, Sam finally accepts Jason’s cash, slapping his hand down under the guise of a ‘we’re pals’ handshake, but he doesn’t take the cash. He grabs Jason’s wrist and holds on hard, pulls him closer to the window.  
  
“Yeah, I heard you’ve been chasing girls who want nothing to do with you,” Sam says, low.  
  
It’s raining. Sam’s protected by the roof of the van, but McCardy’s blinking again it.  
  
“What—” Jason begins and Sam snatches the cash from his fingers.  
  
Sam counts it. It’s enough for six grams, double what he normally buys. “I’ve only got an eighth left,” he tells him and holds the bag out. When Jason reaches, Sam pulls it back into the cab, just out of reach. “Stay away from Brigitte,” he tells him, “Or I will _personally_ fuck you up. Way more than you ever thought you were in October.”  
  
He splits Jason’s cash and flicks it and the eighth of pot out the window into a puddle, then peels out of there is a spray of grey slush. It doesn’t really help him feel better.  
  
~*  
  
“I don’t need you to defend me,” Brigitte says to him, after he drives her home that evening. She’s pissed, arms wrapped tightly around herself.  
  
“Yeah? Well I was just making sure he got the message.”  
  
She sighs. “Just stay out of it.”  
  
“Why? If that fucker hurts you again—”  
  
“I hurt him back,” Brigitte says.  
  
Sam takes a deep, unsteady breath. “Fine,” he says. “Just trying to help.”  
  
She takes a breath. “I know you are. And I appreciate it, but I already took care of this.”

**BRIGITTE**

Apparently, though, she didn’t. Or maybe Jason’s fear of whatever he was becoming is bigger than being afraid of Sam, because it’s not even a week later, when he shows up again.  
  
She’s shelving. The last hour of her shift is creeping by and she is tired, her head hurts, and she still has homework to do before tomorrow morning. Her French textbook is sitting hidden amongst the returns on her book cart, and she stops halfway though Fiction to pull it of the cart, sitting down on one of the step stools in the aisles and opening it up. She smooths the looseleaf she was using as a bookmark out against the book’s pages, slips a pen from her pocket, and starts writing out her answers. She’s still going to have to check her conjugations when she gets to Sam’s but at least the questions will be done.  
  
She writes _Elle a appris_ and then there is a tap on the window, making her jump. Fucking Jason.  
  
It’s fury that gets her up and to the glass. She speaks through it, and her voice is oddly muffled by the books surrounding her, and the quiet. “ _What_.”  
  
“Open the window,” Jason says back. She doesn’t move. “ _C’mon_. I just want to talk.”  
  
“Fuck you,” she shoots back. Turning away, she collects her homework, grabs hold of the book cart, and pulls it back to circulation. There are still books to be shelved, but she can’t bring herself to care. Someone else will have to take care of it in the morning.  
  
Brigitte makes her way down to the front entrance to wait for the night janitor.  
  
Sam still isn’t there when they step out into the night. Normally his headlights illuminate the doors as the janitor locks up, but today it’s dark. It’s more than thirty degrees below, and he’s never been late before. Anxiety claws its way into her chest, dragging at all her ribs, and she tries to push it down.  
  
“Hey, you okay? Your drive coming?”  
  
“Yeah,” Brigitte says. The janitor hesitates, but then just takes her word for it and walks off. He starts his car up and pulls out, and as the sound of his engine fades, Brigitte is left totally alone, standing as close as she can to the building, shivering hard and trying to disappear into shadows. It’s so cold that the air hurts her face, her hands. The shivering makes her head pound harder.  
  
_Where_ is Sam?  
  
Suddenly, to her right, a car starts up, and she recognizes Jason’s rusted out old beater.  
  
She flinches, seriously considering just starting to walk home. Making a split second decision, she takes the steps and starts walking in the direction of the greenhouses. If she takes the main road, Sam will see her if he passes. And at least she’ll be warmer.  
  
Jason pulls the car around in front of her, fast. He leans out his open window, breath frosting in the frigid air. “Cold out, huh? C’mon, Fitz. You got a second to talk now, don’t you?”  
  
She scowls at him.  
  
“Come _on_ ,” Jason says. “You’re going to fucking freeze out here.”  
  
“I thought I told you to stay the fuck away from me.”  
  
Jason shrugs. “Look, you’re makin’ me let all this heat out, okay?”  
  
She glares at him. It’s not a very good glare because her teeth chatter. “If I talk to you, will you leave me alone?”  
  
He looks at her a second too long, then says “Yeah. ‘Cause I bet you know everything that happened, don’t you?”  
  
“I know enough,” she says.  
  
Jason holds her eyes, then leans over and pushes his passenger door open for her. She sighs, and comes around the front of the car, getting in. She pulls the door mostly closed, but doesn't latch it, and she doesn’t let go of the handle, not wanting to lose her escape for a second. Jason rolls his eyes and rolls his window up, but doesn't argue. Jason’s hand is bandaged where she bit him. The car smells strange, and Brigitte feels anxious and nauseous. But he’s right. It’s warm, heat on full blast.  
  
Jason fiddles with a half-empty bottle of pop in his cup holder, opens and closes the ashtray, then he goes still. “…She’s dead, isn’t she?” he asks her.  
  
Brigitte can’t speak, can’t bring herself to say the words out loud. Not to Jason McCardy. But he gets it anyway.  
  
“Oh, fuck… is it… am I gonna die? Is it gonna come back? This— this—”  
  
And she half wants to leave him with that, that fear. After everything he fucking did, after the part he played in driving Ginger and her apart, after trying to get the cops after them…  
  
But she can’t.  
  
“No,” she tells him. “Not unless you get infected again.”  
  
“What was it?” Jason asks. He’s not looking at her, just pressing the ashtray hard even though it’s already closed. “What fucking was it?”  
  
_Lycanthropy_ , Brigitte thinks. _A curse_. She takes a single shallow breath and then another. She can’t really breathe, and her throat feels tight like she might actually be sick. She swallows down too much saliva. “A virus,” she finally says. “What I injected you with; that needle? It increased your body’s ability to fight the infection. That’s all.”  
  
“What, so it was a drug? How the fuck did you even know it was going to work on this?”  
  
But Jason was the test subject, and Brigitte is still afraid of him. Afraid enough that she doesn’t want him to know that. “I’m good at science… I have to go. I have homework.”  
  
He reaches out and grabs her upper arm, “Wait!”, and she reacts immediately, wrenching away enough to slam her fist down hard just where his shoulder meets his neck and Jason yelps and tries to push her off, because she’s getting ready to hit him again. Bright lights flash over them, and they’re both blinded. It makes Jason grab her again, in desperation, and hold on harder.  
  
There’s the sound of brakes squeaking, a door slamming.  
  
“ _Please_. Fuck, Fitzgerald, come on! I just… tell me if all that shit was all real. It was, wasn’t it?” He asks her. “The teeth. The fucking _tail_?” Jason’s door is wrenched open, and Brigitte watches Sam drag Jason out into the lot. Gasping for breath, she scrambles out after them, coming around the front of the car in time to watch Sam shove Jason back against it. He doesn’t hold him there, it’s just a shove, but Jason stumbles back hard enough. He puts his hands up in supplication. “Easy, man.”  
  
“Hey. What the fuck did I tell you?” Sam asks.  
  
But Jason finds Brigitte’s eyes over Sam’s shoulder and says, one-track, desperate, “My _eyes_ changed. A virus doesn’t do that. Hunh?”  
  
“ _Jason_ ,” Brigitte says. “I _told_ you what I know.” And it’s a lie, but it doesn’t matter. She’s given him enough, all things considered. Her arm hurts where he grabbed her, she’s so upset she’s furious.  
  
“But, it was like I was turning into something… I mean… not even fucking human.”  
  
Brigitte thinks he’s hardly human to begin with. “Yeah, McCardy,” she says, and her voice is so much steadier and harder than she feels. “You nailed it. You wouldn’t have been human, you’d be roadkill if it wasn’t for me.”  
  
Jason stares at her, mouth open. And she sees him, suddenly, for what he really is, and all of her fear just dissipates. She turns and walks away, climbs into Sam’s van and and pulls her door shut without looking back. Sam’s right on her heels. He let her have the last word and she isn’t even done pulling her seatbelt on when Sam climbs in beside her. They don’t say anything, Sam pulls back out onto the road and heads in the direction of home.  
  
“You okay?” Sam asks. She glances at him, at the way his fingers shake as he drags on the cigarette he’s lit.  
  
“Yeah…”  
  
“Sorry, Brigitte.”  
  
“For what?”  
  
“Not showing up on time. My job ran late, there was no one to—” he takes a breath. “It doesn’t matter. I’m sorry.”  
  
“That’s okay. …Thanks for not freaking.”  
  
“Why’d you get into his car, Brigitte? He could’ve—”  
  
She knows this narrative. It’s drilled into her, drilled into every fucking girl on the planet. “He's scared… I mean, when he started changing, he didn’t have _anyone_ … I guess I felt sorry for him. Because Ginger had me…”  
  
And Jason? Suddenly on the outside of normal, alienated from all his friends, unable to ever go back to the way it was before, unable to explain the nightmare he’d undergone when he looks completely the same.  
  
“Someone like Jason… it’s never going to be the way it was for him before,” she says, watching the familiar landmarks of her hometown flick past without even really seeing them. “Like, even if he looks totally normal, he's always gonna be different from everyone else. He'll never fit in like before. For someone like Jason? Popular, totally fucking average? I think that’s punishment enough.”

**SAM**

Sam glances over at her, but he can’t see her face. “Yeah? Well, you went through something, too, and I never heard about you pulling the kind of shit he just did.”

"I wasn't changing."

"You were caught up in the middle of it, though."  
  
There’s a pause, and then she says “…I had you.”  
  
And Sam thinks _oh._  
  
~*  
  
January bleeds into February, darker and greyer. The cold seeps through the greenhouse glass, and Sam loses some of the plants because there’s not enough sunlight. It’s getting to him, too. He drinks way too much on a Tuesday while Brigitte is away at school — enough that he can’t drive to meet her for lunch, and that makes him feel like shit because he misses her, and he fucked himself, really, for starting on the rye at eleven, and going way too fast. That’s what makes him drink straight on through to four o'clock when she gets home.  
  
When she comes in the door she pieces it together pretty quickly. He’s barely moved from the couch all day. There’s a cigarette still burning in the full ashtray, and the bottle’s open on the table. She doesn’t say anything though, just moves around him, giving him a wider berth than normal, and makes pasta for supper. Smart girl, because it soaks up the liquor, and he’s functioning well enough to know he’s going to feel like absolute shit tomorrow.  
  
He vows to himself to stop being a fuckup by then, to deal with the dead plants and the dishes and the laundry, and actually meet her for lunch. But Wednesday noon hour comes and goes and Sam hasn’t done a single one of those things. That makes him drink harder, and he’s sick from it, gagging and coughing yellow bile into the toilet when he hears her come in.  
  
“Oh, god _damn_ it,” Sam says, and tries to get up, but the motion’s a lot, and he’s not done getting the poison out, and the next time he retches, it’s with Brigitte standing behind him in the bathroom doorway.  
  
He thinks that might be it. He flushes it and puts the lid down, digs his fingers into his eyes, rubbing them. He feels a hell of a lot more sober now, and that makes everything worse — the pain in his head, the pain deeper inside of him that he can’t touch.

**BRIGITTE**

“…What’s going on?” she finally asks him from the doorway.  
  
“Just… you know. Same old, same old self-destructive waste of space… bullshit.”  
  
Brigitte shifts, crosses her arms. “You’re not a waste of space.”  
  
Sam looks up at her, wrecked. His eyes are bloodshot and he needs to wash his hair. And he doesn’t believe her, she can see that.  
  
Brigitte presses her lips together and goes to the cupboard in the other room where he keeps the dishes, bringing him back a glass of water from the sink because that’s always what he did for her, and she thinks it helped. It helped that he cared.  
  
He accepts it from her, but doesn’t drink, and she slides down the bathroom cabinets to sit beside him on the floor, drawing her knees to her chest. “Can I help?”  
  
“You are helping,” Sam says… “I missed lunch again.”  
  
She shrugs a shoulder. Even though she’d been starving. She thought, at first, that it was a one-off, and now she’s afraid that they’re in for this, the two of them. That Sam is.  
  
“Does it normally get this bad?” she asks him, picking at a loose thread on her skirt.  
  
“Sometimes.”  
  
“You should drink that,” she tells him, indicating the water. “And probably eat something.”  
  
“Yeah. Ugh— okay.” He tenses as his stomach muscles contract and coughs, gags a little, sudden and harsh into his hand, then twists away from her to push the toilet lid back up again. “Brigitte—” he says, like a warning, hanging over the bowl.  
  
“I don’t mind.”  
  
Sam pukes again, mostly bile. It’s rough and painful. She knows how that feels, and she feels sorry for him. She reaches out as he coughs and spits, as though to touch his shoulder, but she chickens out. “Drink the water,” she says, watching him catch his breath, “It’ll help you get it out.”  
  
She goes back out to the cabinet where they keep the food, but there’s nothing other than a can of mixed peas and carrots. Not even saltines. “There’s no food,” she calls out to him. No response. “…I’m gonna order pizza.”  
  
Sam retches in response.

**SAM**

He re-emerges about fifteen minutes later. She’s sitting on the couch with the TV on, turned really low, reading a history textbook, underlining important points. He sits down beside her, slowly. His body fucking hates him. He pulls the blanket over his shoulders, huddling beneath it, eyes on the TV.  
  
“So do you get like, double vision or something?” Brigitte asks.  
  
“Not this time,” Sam says, then breathes a laugh. “Haven’t you ever drank before? There’s nothing else to do in this fucking place.”  
  
“We found stuff to do,” Brigitte says, meaning Ginger and her.  
  
“You’ve never drank anything?”  
  
“Henry drank beer. We stole a can one summer. It was gross.”  
  
“Well. Beer is gross,” Sam says. He leans forward and lights a cigarette.  
  
She reaches out for it and he hesitates before he gives it to her. She glances at him as she takes a drag. “Does drinking really help? When you’re feeling sad?”  
  
Sam shakes his head. “It’s not a good idea, Brigitte.”  
  
“I’m not asking for me.”  
  
“Yeah, sometimes, it helps, I guess” Sam says. He takes his cigarette back. “It makes you not give a shit.”  
  
“I thought pot made you not give a shit.”  
  
He exhales smoke before he answers. “Different sedatives.”  
  
“…I thought alcohol was a depressant,” she says, not looking up from her book.  
  
Sam sighs and doesn’t tell her that sometimes all he wants to do about being depressed is to be more depressed, just so he can channel all that spite right back into himself, but worse, stronger.  
  
“It is.”  
  
“Okay,” Brigitte says, softly.  
  
“What,” he asks, too blunt.  
  
“Nothing.”  
  
“I know I’m a fuckup, okay? I know. You don’t have to rub it in.”  
  
Brigitte meets his eyes. “I wasn’t. And you’re not a fuckup.”  
  
He breathes a laugh. “You just haven’t known me long enough.”  
  
“Then maybe you should let me decide for myself.”  
  
And he has to give her that…  
  
The show ends eventually and it’s just mindless bullshit after, so he shuts it off. The pizza arrives, and they split it and it’s enough to sober him but, but it kicks the headache and the mental exhaustion into overdrive. He knows he should sleep it off, but the bed feels very fucking far, and they haven’t said anything to one another for over an hour and he hasn’t seen her practically at all the last two days, and he knows that’s his fault.  
  
He convinces himself that he’s still drunk enough to slide over and rest his chin on her shoulder. He feels her tense, initially, but she doesn’t pull back, and it’s only for a moment or two before she understands what he’s doing, just looking for comfort, for touch, and then she relaxes again, even leans into it a little, and he shifts to rest his head against her shoulder properly, following the path of her fingers down the edges of the paragraphs as she reads.  
  
After that, the silence doesn’t feel quite so awful.  
  
She gets to the end of her chapter and closes the book in her lap. Sam moves to sit up, but it’s hard. His head pounds with the movement and pins and needles are starting up in his arm where it was caught behind her shoulder. She turns to look at him before he’s ready to handle it. Her eyes are this impossible pale green in the light from the lamp, and her mouth—  
  
Jesus, he really loves her mouth.  
  
He kisses her without thinking about the fact that he hasn’t showered in two days, that he was just throwing up rye and bile a couple hours ago, and that he can’t remember actually brushing his teeth this morning.  
  
“Sorry, jesus, sorry,” he whispers, almost before the kiss has even begun. It’s not very convincing — he’s whispering it against her mouth.  
  
Brigitte pushes her fingers into his hair, fingers sliding up to meet the headache just at his temples, pressing against his scalp, tugging at tangles. She twists to face him and, with both her hands in his hair now, she pulls him to her and kisses him again and he groans softly. It’s a lot at once. She’s only ever really held onto his clothes, touched his hands. Now her fingers press into his scalp, and she’s insistent, so he kisses her back, hard.  
  
At first it’s all heat and want, and then maybe she second-guesses her technique, or gets freaked because she doesn’t pull away, but she slows, leaves it up to him, and he starts having time to think again. Sam draws away again, more successfully this time around, because suddenly he’s too self-conscious, way too aware that this version of himself, unshowered and still hazy, half-drunk and gross, is not really an impression he wants to leave her with, but then he finds himself pressing his mouth to the corner of hers anyway. Finds himself kissing his way down to her neck, taking his time because he can’t seem to stop fucking kissing her. She tips her head up without him coaxing and _oh, god_. Sam’s breathing halfway too fast, but so is she, and that turns him on more than anything else. He wants to touch her stomach, her ribs, just to feel the way she’s breathing, but he doesn’t. Just drags these lazy, heated, half-open kisses down her throat, sucking at the place he can feel her heartbeat pounding.  
  
That pulls a sound from her and his belly floods with heat as her fingers tug at his hair. He wants to push her down into the couch and just press his body against hers, but he thinks that she’s probably not there yet, and that that’s too much. He knows it will be too much to undo the buttons of her shirt collar, and to pull it and the sweater she’s wearing over it down to expose her collarbone just so he can get his tongue against it. But, god he wants to.  
  
But Brigitte’s the one who pushes her textbook onto the floor with a rush of pages and a thud. She slides herself down so that she’s braced on her elbows, wedging one knee between his side and the back of the couch, so quickly that suddenly he’s effectively between her legs and his wild heartbeat sends his headache ratcheting up to a screaming pitch. He tries to bring himself to care that it hurts so much. “Oh. Okay,” he breathes.  
  
They catch each other's eyes, and she’s searching for something in his face and he feels like he can’t be too hard to read because — christ, he likes her so much. When he leans down over her to kiss her again, she rolls back beneath him before he can touch her, until she’s lying against the arm of the couch, and that’s how she gets him close enough to brace his arm on the armrest beside her head. It’s how she gets him closer to her. He buries that hand in her hair, their mouths almost, almost touching, and he doesn't know who starts it, but suddenly they’re kissing again.  
  
He holds his body over her — hovering over her hips, her chest — because he’s afraid to press down. Her tongue slides against his, tentative, and the ache he’s got tells him that he has to stop this soon, because he’s starting to shake. “Okay,” he murmurs into her mouth, and then pushes himself away, too slowly. “Okay, okay, okay” he breathes against her cheek, the shell of her ear, into her hair. “We should stop.”  
  
“Why?” she asks, voice breathless and low, and he meets her eyes which have gone all dark. He’s so fixed on her that his breath hitches and settles to match her breath. He thinks about any number of things he could say, but in the end he settles on a half-truth. “I’m still kinda drunk, so…” And he doesn’t want to mess up another one of her firsts.  
  
She twitches a little, looks away.  
  
“Brigitte,” he says, and she fidgets beneath him, her calf brushing his hip as she tries to re-position herself. He draws back and she sits up, pulling her skirt back down her legs. She won’t look at him now, and he feels like he’s just ruined this whole thing another way.  
  
“Brigitte, hey…”  
  
“Sorry, it’s just… I thought that once guys started, it was like. Hard for them to stop.”  
  
He makes a face like _weren’t you just here for this?_ “I— it is hard, it’s not impossible. But I don’t wanna… I’m not— I can do better than this,” he says, vaguely gesturing to himself. “We can do better… I also feel like I’m about to have a fucking stroke, fuck…” He presses a hand to his eye, digging the heel of his palm into the socket.  
  
“I just…” she begins, and she’s all wrapped around herself, arms around her knees, drawn to her chest. She’s talking to him, face turned his way, but she’s hiding behind her hair. He feels like they take two steps forward and ten steps back. “You say you like me, but you don’t…” she takes this breath, really trying to get up the courage to continue, so he stays quiet. His head pounds.  
  
“I know I’m not like Trina,” she says, and he feels air whoosh from his lungs because it definitely wasn’t _that_ that he was expecting.  
  
“ _What_?” he asks.  
  
Brigitte takes this long, long inhale. “I mean I know I don’t look like her. Like the girls who— guys want. But it’s like you don’t— even when I had that fever, and you helped me with the bath, you didn’t even look at me.”  
  
Sam hesitates, because he remembers that moment, holding onto her while he pulled off her shirt. She was soaked in sweat and shivering. Her eyes had been closed, even against the light from the candles he’d lit. The fabric of her shirt had clung to her body, damp, and he’d dropped it to the floor and steadied her and—  
  
“Yeah, I did.”  
  
— and let his eyes flicker over her breasts, over the bird skull necklace, shockingly white against her skin, against the way the shorts she was wearing swallowed her hips. He could have counted her ribs, her skin burned against his palms…  
  
She looks at him now.  
  
“You were sick, Brigitte. I wasn’t exactly thinking… dirty thoughts.”  
  
He catches her eyes through her protective curtain of hair. She hesitates, then says “Oh,” like she doesn’t know what to do with that, now.  
  
And Sam has put all the pieces together in his fucking aching brain, and realizes what she thinks is happening here. _I don’t look like her_ … “Jesus…” he tries to remember if he’s ever said anything to her about that at all. About _how_ he looks at her, because to him, Brigitte is all these facets of something so impossibly lovely he has no idea how to explain it. Because that’s the thing about her. Her beauty crept up on him, because she hides it, hides _from_ it, maybe. And Sam knows that he could never possibly understand all of the complexity of sisters but he sees these bits and pieces of Brigitte’s personality that are so affected, so coded _Ginger_ that it’s like looking at someone else. He sees the way she is when she wears Ginger’s clothes — the ones she took from the house, and how she’s never actually comfortable in them, but wears them anyway, tugging and adjusting and checking. The sleeves not long enough to pull down over her hands, the necklines too open, the fit too close, and wrong on Brigitte’s body, somehow. And he’s listened to Trina, and to conversations at parties, and he’s heard all about this feeling of being overshadowed by others girls. Sisters, cousins, best friends. Of being the one ignored because all eyes are always on someone else, someone you love too — and you just fade into the background.

And Sam isn’t blind. Ginger was beautiful, striking even before she started to change in a major way, but he hadn’t even cared by then. Because everything about Brigitte was bigger than that. It was Brigitte who drew his eyes to her like a magnet and the colours of everything else seemed to fall by the wayside. How does he explain something that happened to him so softly, so quietly? Because all of the typical words for Brigitte, _beautiful, gorgeous_ are wrong — not because they aren’t true, but because they are the wrong translation. Like trying to figure out what the Latin names for his plants translate to. Like the right word for Brigitte is so old it’s been ingrained in the fabric of the universe for thousands of years. It’s beyond speech now, beyond just the petty societal understanding of what ‘pretty’ means.  
  
He’s been quiet way too long because she gets up and leaves him there, starts putting her school things away.  
  
_Fuck_ , he thinks. “I’m, just… tryin’a…”  
  
“I know,” Brigitte says, making this face, like she was being stupid. “…You don’t have to be nice about it.”  
  
Sam gets up. Everything in his body protests, but he comes around the coffee table to her and catches her face in his hands. He makes her look up at him. She drops her bag to the floor and, suddenly overwhelmed by this, this whole moment, this whole fucking day, he laughs a little, but she knows him well enough to know that that’s just what he does when it’s easier than feeling something else. “Whatever you’re thinking right now,” Sam tells her, “ _Stop_.” And all he can think, of all the thoughts he’d just had, the only explanation he can get himself to say out loud is “ _I like you_ ,” but he’s said it before. He hears himself say it now with such intense sincerity he wonders if maybe she’ll understand it differently this time.

**BRIGITTE**

Sam says “ _I like you_ ,” and his smile’s gone. She wants to pull away, because she feels like she’s asked too much, now. She was searching for something she shouldn’t even care about. Sam’s eyes on hers feels intense and she tries to step back but he holds her. It doesn’t scare her like it did with Jason, but still, she doesn’t want to be here in this moment anymore, and she’s sorry she started it. She closes her eyes: against his gaze, against the room. She wonders if she’s supposed to respond with _I like you, too_ , but it feels trite, so she doesn’t.  
  
Instead, she says “Okay,” when what she actually wants to say is ‘ _Really_?’ and she can feel by the way he reluctantly lets her go, that he doesn’t believe her ‘okay’ for a second.  
  
She turns away to get ready for bed. She shuts herself in the bathroom to change into the shorts and t-shirt she sleeps in and doesn’t look at herself in the mirror. She pees and washes her hands and then pushes the door open so that they’re not quite so cut off as she brushes her teeth. The light changes and she looks up from where she’s been examining the scar on her palm to Sam in the doorway.  
  
“You wanna throw up again?” she asks around her toothbrush, trying to lighten the mood, but half-serious about the question.  
  
He scoffs a laugh, his eyes flickering between hers. “Have you ever been to Ottawa?” he asks.  
  
“No,” she says, still brushing.  
  
“I went there a few years ago with my dad, for this thing they had going on at the Nature Museum. We drove there in the van, and there was this big storm coming the whole day. We were always just a little ahead of it and, when we got there, fuck, the city was just impossibly humid, like… like walking through soup.”  
  
Brigitte makes a noise of disgust and leans over to spit out a mouthful of foam, rinsing her brush before she straightens again, brushing her back molars. He’s toying with a tiny mason jar filled with bits of dried flower petals. When the shower runs and heats the room, it smells like peppermint and something softer and more floral that she doesn’t recognize.  
  
“Anyway, we saw the exhibit and then dad went back to the hotel and I just kinda… you know, we’d been sitting in the van all day, and I was feeling like I couldn’t breathe. All that recycled air from the air con, and then the humidity. So I just walked around for a while. Down to Chinatown and back, and then the sky just fucking opened up, like this total deluge of rain. Thunder and everything. Everyone was standing in doorways, you know, waiting for it to stop; but from a distance? Total ghost town. I think I walked all the way back up to Bank Street. I was fucking soaked. Eventually though, the storm ended. Just kept crawling east like it had been all day. And…” Sam takes this breath, still now, speaking carefully as he continues. “And the sun… was halfway set, I guess, so it came through the lower part of the cloud cover. But… yeah, it wasn’t at all like those sunset pictures everyone goes apeshit over — like typical pink and purple beach scene or whatever. I mean, honestly, I’d never seen anything like it before, it was just… this crazy, yellow sky, and above that, the clouds were still all fuckin’ ominous. Everything on the ground was either silhouetted dark or reflecting the sky. And the rain took away the humidity away, so for the first time all day I could breathe again… You know how something absolutely simple can happen and you just feel like… so fucking mortal? Anyway…” Sam takes a breath. “Anyway, that’s what it’s like. When I’m with you.”  
  
Sam sort of winces, like even that’s not right quite right, like maybe he’s said too much.  
  
And Brigitte; Brigitte’s stunned. She doesn’t know when she stopped brushing her teeth, but she’s just standing there holding her toothbrush in her hand like an idiot. It’s the fucking worst, because literally all she can do — before she can do or say anything else — is spit out her mouthful of toothpaste. It feels spectacularly mishandled, but she’s not about to swallow it. So she just does it; she leans over the sink and holds her hair back with her toothbrush hand to spit and then wipes her mouth before she can meet Sam’s eyes.  
  
And maybe it’s the way he’s looking at her now — because he just compared her to the most remarkable sunset he’s ever seen, just to have her spit toothpaste foam into his sink — but she can see in his eyes that he’s acknowledging the juxtaposition here and isn’t quite sure what to do with it. Brigitte tries very hard to hold onto the seriousness, the vulnerable sincerity of this moment, but she can’t. She snorts a little, then laughs, this sudden “fft,” of air.  
  
Sam cracks, too.  
  
And then they’re both just in gales of laughter. Every time she thinks she can collect herself he sets her off again. She can’t even remember the last time she laughed this hard. Maybe she thought that you kinda didn’t, with guys you really liked. Maybe she never imagined laughing like this with anyone but Ginger, but she can’t even bring herself to feel guilty. Not this time. She doesn’t feel like making a space for it right now. Because she feels so on _level_ with him suddenly, like they’ve finally reached this equal ground. Where ‘ _friends_ ’ and ‘ _I like you_ ’ aren’t just stand-ins in for ‘ _I’ll help you make a cure for becoming a werewolf_ ’ and ‘ _we’ve experienced so much of the same trauma_ ’ but just stand for what they really are.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the re-upload, some things had to be adjusted and there's more added to the last half now.

**SAM**

The following morning he can’t quite bring himself to get out of bed, but he pushes himself up onto his elbow so he can talk with her while she gets ready for school. And something’s shifted, since last night, he thinks. Because there’s something easier about her now, or like she’s just on the cusp of it. He can’t quite figure out exactly what it is, but maybe she’s lost a little more of that tension she carries in her shoulders. Maybe she holds his eyes longer.  
  
He’s glad he told her what he did. Even though it felt a little insane, a little too much, he’d just felt like he had to say something. He still does’t know if it’s good enough, but it was true, and he’d gotten to hear her laugh like that. That counts for something.  
  
“Bye,” she says as she leaves, hauling her schoolbag up onto her shoulder.  
  
“Bye,” he repeats, and thinks that he would rather be able to kiss her.  
  
She slips out the door, and he hears the one at the far end of the greenhouse rattle, and then she’s gone.  
  
He doesn’t let himself go back to sleep. He’s got to do better than this, get his act together. So he gets up and gets to work. He does the dishes, gathers up the laundry — both of theirs — to take to the laundromat. While he waits for the clothes to be done, he reads some of Christina Rosetti’s _Goblin Market_ , and lets it sit heavy in his gut.  
  
     _Evening by evening_  
_Among the brookside rushes,_  
_Laura bowed her head to hear,_  
_Lizzie veiled her blushes:_  
_Crouching close together_  
_In the cooling weather,_  
_With clasping arms and cautioning lips,_  
_With tingling cheeks and finger tips._  
_“Lie close,” Laura said,_  
_Pricking up her golden head:_  
_“We must not look at goblin men,_  
_We must not buy their fruits:_  
_Who knows upon what soil they fed_  
_Their hungry thirsty roots?”_  
_“Come buy,” call the goblins_  
_Hobbling down the glen._  
  
Afterwards, he swings by the pharmacy to see if he can find capsulated Saint John’s Wart, but they direct him to the health food store. It’s not there, either. Fucking Ontario. He makes a mental note to seed some so he can make it on his own for next year. A tincture or something. Modern witchcraft.  
  
And he makes it to Brigitte in time for lunch. Normally she would wait for him at the bottom of the school steps, leaning back against the stone railing, always alone, always looking very morose, Sam thinks, huddled in her dark colours, that scowl she wears when she’s alone in a crowd.  
  
Today, though, he doesn’t see her there. “Shit,” he says, softly, because maybe he’s missed out on lunch too often. Maybe she doesn’t wait for him anymore. Maybe she’s found people to talk to, or maybe she’s in trouble. He doesn’t like that thought. He’s trying not to entertain it because he’ll go fucking crazy if he’s constantly worrying about her when they’re not together.  
  
The school doors open, and a group of girls emerge, all long crimped hair and “No _way_!” “Waaaay!”ing. Sam’s done. He presses the gas and it’s in his peripheral as the van pulls forward that he sees her.  
  
The brakes squeak as he stops again, suddenly. She’s smoking next to an air vent around the corner of the front doors, pressed in close to the warm air coming out. He hits the horn, one sharp, short sound and she looks up. So do a few other kids. Sam ignores them. He watches Brigitte brighten. He thinks, maybe, there was almost a smile there, but it’s gone by the time she trudges through the snow to the van and climbs in, cigarette still burning between her fingers.  
  
“Hey, what’s going on,” she says as Sam cranks the heat for her.  
  
“This is it.” He pulls away from the front of the school. “Where’d you get that cigarette?” he asks, genuinely curious.  
  
“Um… they’re yours.”  
  
“Oh,” he says, parking along the side of the street around the corner like he usually does. “So you’re a thief,” he teases.  
  
She holds it out to him but he doesn’t take it. He opens his own pack, but he has no idea how many were in there. “How long have you been stealing my cigarettes?”  
  
She smiles, one corner of her mouth lifting and shrugs.  
  
“Jesus.” He tosses the pack onto the dash. “I just got fast food,” he says, flicking the paper bag between them.  
  
“I didn’t know if you were gonna come,” she says, rolling down her window enough to throw her — his —  cigarette out.  
  
“Here I am,” Sam says.  
  
She nods, picking through things in the bag and choosing chicken nuggets. He watches her shift down in the passenger seat, bracing her knees against the dash. Her hair is clouded around her face, mostly tucked beneath her scarf.  
  
They talk about nothing, really, but it’s easy, companionable. He eats the burger, they split the fries. It’s like always, and he likes that there’s some kind of history to compare this to. Like this is a habit, it’s familiar. It’s what they do, him and Brigitte.  
  
But there’s one thing…  
  
The buzzer for the end of lunch goes and Brigitte pulls a face and straightens up in the passenger seat. She heaves this sigh like she’s headed for the gallows, but she’s resigned to it.  
  
“You never skip, huh?”  
  
“I have to turn in a Canadian Literature essay,” she says.  
  
“What’ve we even got to fuckin’ write about?”  
  
“ _Barometer Rising_ ,” she says. “It sucks. Should’ve done Marian Engel’s book.”  
  
Sam shakes his head, he’s never heard of it.  
  
“The main character fucks a bear,” Brigitte says, then pushes the passenger door open. Sam’s still processing that. He almost misses his chance as she slips out into the snow again, but he collects himself in time, grabs her hand which is still cold despite the heat blasting from the van’s heaters.  
  
“Hey, hold on” he says, and leans across the seat, tugging her close enough to kiss her. It’s the first time it’s ever happened outside of his place, which feels insular and safe. When he pulls back, she blinks at him, flushed.  
  
“What was that for?” she asks.  
  
“Bye,” Sam says, laughing a little.

**BRIGITTE**

“Oh. Bye— okay. Yeah.” She steps back and pushes the door shut, looking a little dazed. They hold each other’s eyes for a moment, but then Sam pulls away and she realizes she’s going to be late. Her heart is skipping in her chest, even before she turns and runs back to class.  
  
She’s still late, but it’s not as mortifying as it normally would be to walk into a classroom last, everyone watching her drop her essay on top of the pile before she makes her way to the back to her seat.  
  
“Well, now that my class has been deemed important enough for _everyone_ to show up—” the teacher begins her lecture again. Brigitte hides behind her hair. She presses the backs of her fingers against her mouth to stop her smile.  
  
She doesn’t even think that she shouldn’t be happy about something so small, so stupid as a kiss goodbye. Or that she should be ashamed that she’s definitely girling out. But it’s like— she doesn’t know, it’s like, at Sam’s they’re so… protected. The world consists of just the two of them, and it’s safe there. When he kisses her there it’s different — safer, closer. Just Sam and her. But here, outside, it’s different. She knows the rules, even if she doesn’t necessarily participate in them. People who kiss have this thing, where it’s like… once that happens, everyone knows that they’re a unit. Like this invisible line connects them to that other person, even when they’re apart. Like maybe, in a way, they belong to one another for a little while.  
  
Brigitte breathes against the ache inside her, this intense wanting for that — that feeling again. To belong to someone the way she belonged to Ginger, even just a little. She knows that no one else will ever come close. It’s engrained in her bones, in her DNA, because no matter what Ginger thought at the end, they were still sisters, and Brigitte still loved her, craved her closeness. Brigitte worries about things like forgetting the smell of Ginger’s skin, about losing the way her voice sounded, but she knows she will never forget how it felt to belong to her.  
  
She knows it won’t ever be the same with Sam as it was with Ginge, but maybe… maybe it could be close. Maybe Sam wants it, too. And Brigitte’s terrified to want it at all, but she does. Oh god, she really does, and she digs her fingernails into the fabric of her skirt beneath her desk to ground herself. She doesn’t hear a word of the lecture.  
  
It’s weird, walking home on a Wednesday, because normally she goes to the library, but her volunteer hours are done. She just needs to do shelving, and that’s not until nine. Sam isn’t there when she gets back, but the dishes are done, the bed’s made, and there are plant books spread all over the table open to pages with yellow flowers. St. John’s Wart.  
  
Curious, she stands over them, reading their uses. And all three books cite alleviating depression. She touches the pages gently, wishes that there were something she could do to help Sam. The black orchid sits on the corner of the table, still supported by its splint. Curious, she marks his page with her finger and turns through to a section on orchids. The book does’t say anything about depression, but Sam’s written in the margins something about the flow of energy through living things. The note is a half-thought. There’s a question mark after it.  
  
The door opens and Brigitte jumps as Sam comes in. He looks at her, at the open flower books and says “Can I help you find something, miss?” as he takes off his coat, like she’s a customer,  
  
She considers, looks back down at the page. “What does this mean?” she asks.  
  
He comes around to her, stands close enough that he brushes against her back, leaning past her shoulder to read. “Oh, that’s… uh, well… yeah, so it’s this theory that all natural things have… energy. Like a life-flow. It’s something that you can feel if you’re, say, highly intuitive or know how to work with them. And it’s not just living things, either, in the sense that we as humans understand living, right? Rivers, stones, soil, they all have energy, it’s— the whole fucking universe has it, so… it can be used or manipulated to work in certain ways, because it follows the path of least resistance. Which means if you just channel it right, it can help with… you know, diseases, prosperity, fertility. It’s… yeah.”  
  
Sam has this way of talking about things he cares about that she likes. “So how do you know what kind of energy Black Orchids have?”  
  
Sam hesitates, his eyes on her, on the flower in the corner, on his handwriting in the book, and then back to her again. “It was just something I felt.”

**SAM**

And then he’d paid well over a hundred dollars for a single plant. But at least now it’s no longer the most insane thing he’s ever done.  
  
He watches her mulling this over. She twists her mouth and looks up at him, and at first he thinks it’s skepticism, but then she says “Like six months ago, I never would have believed you.”  
  
Sam breathes a laugh, because it’s not really funny, why she believes it now.  
  
“So you really weren’t joking about the whole witch thing?” she asks.  
  
“They called it something different, before,” Sam says. “Healers, medicine women. And then men started going to universities and decided that science was the only way to heal people. And that they didn’t want any competition in their work.”  
  
“You mean they didn’t want medicine women taking their work,” Brigitte says.  
  
“Right,” says Sam. “That’s partly why the witch-hunts started. The Enlightenment fucked people up. We forgot that the earth actually provides all these ways to heal us and that science wasn’t the only way forward. Fuck, I mean: advancement works, but only when we don’t forget the past. So, I dunno, it’s just— that way of things — the old ways of healing mixed with modern science, I think that there could be something really beautiful there. A perfect marriage of the two instead of picking one or the other… I mean, that always made sense to me because... I was always actually _good_ at this. Plants, gardening. Not so much the expert anywhere else.”  
  
Brigitte shakes her head, flips the pages back to St. John’s Wart. “That’s not true. Anyway, you don’t need to be smart in every subject.”  
  
“You mean like you are?” Sam asks her, gently teasing.  
  
She pulls a face. “I’m pretty average, actually. It’s not hard to get high marks when you aren’t… distracted.”  
  
“You love school,” Sam tells her. “The work, I mean.”  
  
“I wish I could do it without having to sit in classrooms,” Brigitte says. “All those people, it makes me feel sick. Like actually, it’s a lot to take. It’s loud, people are so grating, sometimes.” She sighs, pulling a chair out and sitting down sideways in it, loops her arm through the rungs on the back.    
  
“Yeah,” Sam says. “I remember.”  
  
“After this year, I could be done next January, but they still want me to do another full year at least.” Brigitte rolls her eyes, and he can see her frustration. She digs at the wood of the back of the chair rungs with her fingernails. “I talked to the academic advisor and she said that because I already skipped a grade, they don’t want me to graduate too early. I think like… I dunno. She wants me to do Grade 13 so I can go to university, but.”  
  
“You don’t want to go to university, then?”  
  
“I don’t want to do an extra year of high school to _get_ there. How did you _do_ it?”  
  
“Grinned and beared it,” Sam says, leaning back against the table next to her. “And then I didn’t go to university anyway, so. Giant _waste_ of time.”  
  
“Four more years of school sounds like torture, anyway.”  
  
Sam’s quiet, and gloom descends on her like stormclouds. Sam nudges her knee with his leg. “What would you do? In university?”  
  
She pulls a strand of hair from the back of her neck forward, tugging it as she thinks. Finally she says “I’ve never thought about it. Biochemistry. Maybe? I like knowing how things work. Or photography.”  
  
He hears it in her voice, that that’s the one, that that’s what she really wants, but he doesn’t say it. She’ll figure it out on her own, and he thinks he should let her. Her 35mm camera has sat untouched on the deacons bench at the end of the bed for months.  
  
Sam says. “I know a good place to take pictures. If you like scenery or whatever.”  
  
“I’m better at portraits,” she says, like this is something that’s been told to her. “Where is it?”  
  
“I’ll take you. Once spring comes.”

**BRIGITTE**

Much later that night, Brigitte lies curled next to Sam in the bed, her calf caught comfortably between his, their knees brushing. They aren't really touching anywhere else, but she can feel his breath in her hair, and she’s close enough to his chest that she can smell him — familiar, comforting. Neither of them are asleep yet. Sometimes, if she waits long enough, he will reach out to her. Smooth her messy hair down so it doesn’t tickle his face, sometimes play with her rings, slide his fingertips over her fingers. He’s always soft, careful. She feels like he’s in tune with her. He notices when she tenses in a way that even Pamela didn’t. Or maybe Pamela just ignored it.  
  
Brigitte tries not to think about her, because then she feels so guilty, and sometimes that’s too hard, on top of everything else Brigitte carries. Anyway, it was Pamela's choice.  
  
Sam shifts, and she feels the backs of his fingers brush her stomach through the thin, oversized t-shirt she’s wearing, and she can’t stop herself from pulling in a breath. It’s a touch with purpose, and he seems to second guess himself at the noise she makes and pulls back.  
  
“Sorry—”  
  
“I didn’t expect it… you can.” _Can what?_ She doesn’t really know, but she thinks she’d probably let him do a whole lot.  
  
“Sure?”  
  
“If I’m not, you’ll know,” she says, and it sounds like less of a threat when it’s spoken softly, so close to his chest.  
  
So he touches her, the way he did before, just as soft, no more insistent or invasive. He slides his fingers slowly up to her lowest rib rung and traces it with his thumb. Brigitte takes a long slow breath. “Do you think we’d ever have met if…?”  
  
Neither of them really say it out loud. It’s just this thing that’s happened. Maybe they don’t know what to call it, or maybe it feels too strange.  
  
“I don’t think so,” he says. “Not unless you started buying pot.”  
  
“Maybe a tree in our yard would have fallen in a storm.”  
  
“Yeah,” says Sam, “Or maybe you would have needed a flower arrangement.”  
  
Brigitte breathes a laugh and Sam’s hand slides over the softer place between her hip and her ribs and holds on gently and she hears her breath hitch. “Maybe… um…” she’s losing track. “Maybe I could have done volunteer hours with you instead of the library.”  
  
“Nobody comes for that anymore,” Sam says. “Tree planting? The work’s too hard.”  
  
“You don’t advertise.”  
  
“I hate people.”  
  
Brigitte laughs. Sam nudges her nose with his and when she raises her head, he kisses her. He slides his fingers beneath her shirt and grazes his fingertips over her stomach and heat explodes inside of her, this ache building between her legs. It’s more intense when he’s kissing her, that feeling.  
  
When he pulls himself closer, she rolls onto her back so it’s easier to reach his mouth and he follows, and he’s close, and Brigitte’s first instinct is that it’s too much because it’s not like on the couch the other day where he held himself above her like she had a forcefield around her. Now, he’s touching her, the length of his body against hers, but almost lightly. And he’s warm, and he encircles her head with one arm. She doesn’t feel like she’s being held down. And then Sam makes this sound into her mouth, and when his palm against her belly tugs at the material of her shirt, she lifts her hips so that the fabric slides from beneath them, from beneath her back. She doesn’t know if it’s that her hips brush against his, or that his hand slides up fast over her ribs and stops just at the underside of her right breast that shocks the soft, breathless _“Fuck”_ out of him.  
  
She freezes beneath him, her hands curling into fists, not touching him, not touching anything. Their mouths are close enough to feel his breath, but he’s stopped kissing her. The moment stretches out, and all Brigitte can hear is their breathing and her heart. They’re both waiting for the other. She feels like it could go on forever, but then Sam kisses her again, very, very slowly and softly. She lets her fingers fall lightly against his face, and then pulls him deeper into her mouth.

**SAM**

It honestly is an accident that he touches her chest, his index and thumb echoing the shape of her body. She doesn’t tense up, she just catches her breath.  
  
Her skin is so, so soft, and her ribs expand and contract rhythmically beneath his palm, and then they are kissing again. Jesus, it's hard to resist her when she’s so close. And she pulls him into her until their teeth clatter and it’s like — there’s only so much he can take. And maybe, he thinks, he had this idea that they were waiting, that they would, or… fuck, he doesn’t really know. Maybe just waiting until they were both less desperate for comfort? But then again, he thinks maybe things don't often work all neat and tidy that way. Maybe he's always been lonely.  
  
It’s just that Brigitte is actually comforting. Quiet, steadfast, determined little creature that she is. She’s not like Trina who tried to fill all of Sam’s silences like they were something bad, when they weren’t. (Or he didn’t mean them to be.) Gently, Sam slides his hand up to cup Brigitte’s breast, and there’s a beat, but then she presses up into his touch. She barely fills his palm, but he likes the contrast of her body. The softness of her, the hard, narrow spokes of her ribs.  
  
Brigitte’s hands slide from his face to his back, and she grabs two fistfuls of his t-shirt and pulls. He draws away from her to help get it off, and for a moment, they both just look at each other in the darkness, gasping. There are scarred over puncture wounds on his left side around his ribs, in his stomach. They look years old, but they’re just from October, being dragged downstairs by the wolf. Brigitte drops his shirt to the floor, her eyes fixed on those scars, and then she looks up at him and pulls her own shirt off, and she’s all pale skin and shadows and wild hair, and Sam is practically overcome.  
  
When he moves forward again, he cups her cheek in one hand, and kisses the other side of her face at her temple. Her hands, cold, fall against his chest and pull back a couple of times before they stay. He exhales against her jawline. “Okay?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
And then Sam ducks his head and slides his tongue over her collarbone like he’s wanted to for days, and she makes a noise. Her head tips back. “Fuck,” he whispers again, against the top of her sternum, “Brigitte—”  
  
“Shhh,” she breathes, and he watches her fingers grip the sheets where she’s bracing herself.  
  
“I just—”  
  
“ _Sam_.” She says _Sam_ like _shut up_ and he exhales this shaky laughter. Her fingernails dig against the top of his spine and pull him in.

**BRIGITTE**

He kisses her and kisses her, and she’s got this tight, aching feeling in her belly, and then he pulls her into his lap, both hands on her waist. He lifts her easily — she’d forgotten how strong he was. They are suddenly so close that their chests press together. If she straightens her spine, she’s taller than him and Sam— _oh, that’s_ — he’s hard against her, through the fabric separating them, against the inside of her hip, against her stomach.  
  
“Tell me to stop, I stop,” Sam whispers, all at once, trying to get it out before she can shush him again.  
  
She wishes she knew what to do next, but she doesn’t want to stop, and Sam’s mouth moves from hers to her neck. It’s slower now, hot damp heat on her skin where his lips trail all these outside parts of her that she has barely ever even noticed. She’d noticed them on Ginger — the palest freckles, her long legs, the way the hollow of her belly flared into the sharp bowl of her hips when she lay on her back. Brigitte’s spent a life just seeing that her body wasn’t Ginger’s, and probably not knowing what to do with it, if it were. That’s why things like that aren’t wasted on her. But Sam kisses her like he sees her, all her outside lines. Sam kisses her neck like he’s wanted to. Holds her waist and his hands fit precisely in the soft, vulnerable places between her hip bones and her ribs, and she isn’t afraid. But she can’t shake the feeling that she’s not as present as Sam is, not as wanting.  
  
He kisses her shoulder, lingering there, eventually pulling back until he’s centimetres from her skin. “Brigitte?”  
  
When she doesn’t respond, he draws back to meet her eyes and she hides under her hair.

**SAM**

Her fingers tap out this uncertain rhythm against his shoulder and he doesn’t even need to see it to know what she’s doing — that flexing of her hands she does, like she can rid herself from something by shaking it from her fingertips. And he realizes that he’s gonna need more than just silent acquiescence.  
  
“Hey, what’s up?” he asks. He ducks his head, forehead against hers, and she draws in a breath, and it takes a moment or two but he waits it out, waits for her to sort out how she wants to say whatever’s on her mind.  
  
He watches the flickering movement of her eyelashes and then she looks up and kisses him again, soft and not long enough. Sam takes a steadying breath against her absence. They finally lock eyes in the dim light.  
  
“I feel like I’m not doing this right—” she starts. When he furrows her brow at her she continues, dropping her eyes. “I’m not— thinking— …what if I want…” She takes a breath and starts over. “Okay, I want to? But it’s like… like when the focus on the camera is wrong. Like my head’s only half here, so I… I’m having trouble focusing. So then it feels like I’m lying if I say ‘keep going.’ ”  
  
“Okay,” he says, trying to get his head around that. And he needs her to be present, _she_ needs to be. That's a given. “That’s okay, c’mere.” He shifts, draws away from her a little, but never stops touching her. He pulls her down with him, side by side, and he’s switched their usual spots on the bed so that her back is to the room and his is to the wall. She looks like she’s right on the cusp of disappointed, so he slides his hand down her side, catches her hip which is mostly swallowed beneath the fabric of her sweat shorts. “What were you thinking about?”  
  
She swallows, and he can practically watch her walls going up one by one by one.  
  
“Ginger,” She says.  
  
“…Huh.” It’s the only thing he can think to follow up with.  
  
“Not…” Brigitte says, then takes this hard breath and lets it out. “I just mean… I always wanted to look like her because. She’s so— she… she was so pretty… And I just realized I didn’t even know… like the lines of my own body ‘cause like… all I could see was that it wasn’t like her. Until you— just now, I just felt really real for a second. Like, solid, not just… a shadow of someone else.”  
  
Sam’s quiet, but he runs his thumb back and forth over her skin just above her waistline. He thinks _she really messed you up, huh?_ but maybe that’s just sisters. “You’re easy to see,” he says, finally. “I always thought.”  
  
“Ginger saw me. And I always thought no one else would ever get me the way she did. But now, sometimes, I don’t even know if she did…”  
  
It’s not a revelation, he can hear it in her voice. She’s been thinking about this for a long time. Old grief, pain dulled by time. It’s harder to be angry with people when they’re dead, Sam knows, but sometimes the anger and hurt is real anyway. It needs to go somewhere, and there’s no longer a vessel to channel it into. It’s hard. It’s hard being hurt by ghosts.  
  
And Sam wishes he could help her, wishes he had some kind of insight, but he’s never had siblings, and he never knew Ginger, before she changed. He barely even knew her at all, and he’d seen the two of them together a handful of times. Most of those times, it was like he wasn’t even there. They’d been in their own little world, Brigitte and Ginger.  
  
Brigitte runs a hand over her eyes like she’s clearing something away. It’s a gesture too old, too worn, for her age. Like her voice is. And her voice he likes, but the way this tiredness filters into her body, he feels like they could both do without that.  
  
And then Brigitte asks, “Do you still want to…?” and leaves the ending unfinished.  
  
“Do you?” he asks her.  
  
She hesitates less than a second, but it feels long to Sam. Then she nods.  
  
“C’mere, then,” he tells her, but doesn’t pull. He’s handing her control and when she slides closer and kisses him, he rolls back a little beneath it, compliant. She’s working through something now, something all wrapped up with Ginger and how to separate herself from that. If he’s the catalyst, or the vessel to get her there, he’ll take it, gladly.  
  
Her fingers go first to the scars on his neck. She’s touched them before, but not purposefully like this, exploratory. They don’t hurt anymore. Neither do the ones on his torso, but his right shoulder, his collarbone, both ache from time to time. When he’s tired, when the weather’s cold. She follows the length of those scars all the way to the hollow of his throat. Her fingers press against his clavicle, like she’s testing its strength, testing for breaks.  
  
“Oh my God—”

**BRIGITTE**

“I know,” he says.  
  
Part of the bone of his right clavicle is missing. Too damaged to heal even with the virus. There’s a hollow where there shouldn’t be, the bone thinner in one spot, curving over empty space like an upside-down bowl.  
  
“Does it hurt?”  
  
“Sometimes.”  
  
She hooks her fingers over it, the unbroken place, and leans down to kiss him. Her breasts brush his chest and he arches against her, like he’s desperate for touch. She drags her fingers down, almost rough, over his chest, counts his ribs as she goes, her fingers hooking at each one — two, three, four…  
  
He breathes faster beneath her, the kiss becoming messy, broken, and he buries one hand in her hair. The other slides up her thigh until he meets the fabric of her shorts. She likes that, the way he breathes. She likes the way he looks at her when she pulls away, because his eyes look so dark. His mouth, dark. There is so much inside a person that cannot be touched, but she wants to reach inside, anyway, try to connect.  
  
“Jesus, you’re beautiful,” he tells her. It spills out of him, but it’s not the same as telling her she’s like the aftermath of a storm. She thinks she likes that better, because it makes her feel more powerful, like she could embody that perfect, natural phenomena. Like she could know intrinsically the right thing to do. She wonders what else she could draw out of him, but doing it feels like reaching into a still, black pool at night. She’s half-afraid of the process itself. She’s afraid to put parts of herself where she’s not in her control anymore. She’s afraid to let people see what’s inside her, because even she doesn’t really know. She’s all these pieces of how she thinks she should be. Fragments of Ginger and _Bee_. Bee isn’t Brigitte, she realizes, now. Bee is so many layers of protection that _Brigitte_ could barely move.  
  
She feels the two pieces of herself split apart inside her, and it hurts. Makes her reckless. Bee flinches back from this closeness with someone Else. Someone Other. But Brigitte looks down at this boy panting beneath her, between her legs and sees someone who would have died for her. Who almost did. (Brigitte touches the bite-scar at this side, presses her palm to the centre of it, and he is still so solid and whole beneath her hand). Even Ginger never did that. _You said you’d die_ with _me, because you had nothing better to do._  
  
Brigitte blinks because there are tears in her eyes, but it’s too dark for Sam to see them. When she skims her fingers from the scar to his hip it’s very quickly. His lower abdomen is hot, almost feverish, but even through the fabric of his underwear, his cock is hotter. She just lets her hand slide over him, until she meets her own inner thigh and stops. Sam’s shut his eyes, tight, and she realizes that he’d let her stop now, if she wanted to, and that throws her. Because it’s not what Pamela said.  
  
She shifts, hears the sharp sound his breath makes as she stops touching him, but then her fingers slip between the fabric and his skin, heel of her hand against the furnace-heat of his abdomen. “Sam—?”  
  
They say each other’s names like questions. It’s not at all like she heard it would be. Aren't names usually reserved for the end — the culmination of all this pressure and ache?  
  
He looks at her, for the space of three, hard breaths, and then says “Whatever you want.”  
  
So she touches him, slides her hand over him beneath the fabric, and it’s different from what she thought it would be, too. His skin there is velvet-soft, slides and shifts beneath her palm, and she is so close to what’s inside of him she reels a little. There is nothing on her body that feels like that. Sam’s hand slips beneath the hem of her shorts and slides all the way up her thigh to the place it meets her hip. When did they stop kissing, she wonders. When did she stop feeling so self-conscious beneath his gaze?  
  
If she thought there was going to be complexity to this, there isn’t. She twists her wrist so that she can hold him and Sam makes this sound and suddenly he’s all tension. She can’t see his eyes anymore, just the darkness of his eyelashes against his cheeks, the wet white flash of his teeth as he hisses, the edge of her ring, sliding, dragging. She pulls away to pull them off, loses them somewhere in the sheets. He twists onto his side again, pulls her down with him by the hip and they are in their usual spots. The wall is cold against her back, the sheets are twisted roughly around their legs, and they both shove them, kick them down further. Sam pushes his underwear off, and then he’s just— he’s there, completely unclothed like it’s nothing. And Brigitte thinks he’s beautiful, too, but the words stick in her throat, because it’s not just that. It’s both wilder and quieter than she ever could have imagined. Like _there you are. Of course, of course._  
  
He is very human. Scarred and smaller than she’d imagined, somehow. Naked, she realizes he’s not altogether that much bigger than she is. He’s just broader, stronger. She meets his eyes, and he’s been watching her look at him. She half reaches out.  
  
“You okay?”  
  
She nods.  
  
He catches her half-extended hand and presses his mouth to her palm.  
  
“Say it,” he says against her wrist.  
  
“I’m okay.”  
  
“Stop?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“Okay.”  
  
He kisses her. After a moment, she reaches down to circle him in her hand again, still caught up in the soft, strange feel of his skin, the heat there. After a moment his breathing turns into a laugh, and he reaches down and wraps his hand around hers, pressing her fingers tighter.  
  
“Sorry—”  
  
“No,” he breathes.  
  
She lets him guide the way she’s touching him, harder than she expected, but still slow. She likes the way his fingers twitch against hers. She likes the way the kiss dissolves into something else, until he’s just panting against her mouth.  
  
When he buries his face against her neck and says her name, something shifts. It’s not quite a question. He lets go of her hand, and she can feel him shaking for a moment, and then he’s not touching anything, just holding his hand there, hovering above hers as she touches him the way he showed her.  
  
His breath breaks sharply and he reaches down, stopping her movement. All the tension in his body hits this peak. He muffles a sound against her skin, and it vibrates there, confusing the fast rhythm of her heart. He comes into his own palm, fingers half-overlapping hers.  
  
His gasps turn into “Hunh, holy shit,” and he rolls away enough accidentally knock a box of kleenex from the rickety table beside the bed onto the floor. “Fuck— damn it.” He struggles to sit up without getting anything on the sheets and she bites her lip hard.  
  
“That’s pretty inconvenient,” she tells him, voice dry, but a smile tugging at her mouth. Sam shoots her a look over his shoulder as he finds the kleenex and wipes his hand off.

**SAM**

“Yeah, well—” he breaks into a laugh, short and quiet, because she’s not wrong and his brain hasn’t caught up fast enough to be witty. He rolls back. Something sticks him sharply and he reaches beneath his side and holds up one of her rings as he lies back down next to her. She takes it from him, slides it back on, then smooths her palm along the mattress, searching for her second ring, but comes up empty. Sam touches the inside of her wrist.  
  
“Hey, you should let me… what do you want me to do?”  
  
She looks up at him like he’s just spoken to her in a foreign language. He smiles, but it’s because he doesn’t know what else to do, how else to say this delicately. “I mean, you should let me…” he’s going in circles. “Let me um… if you want.”  
  
“You’re— you’re really selling it.”  
  
“You’ve got a mouth on you, don’t you, fucking sarcastic—”  
  
She huffs this laugh, reaches down to press her fingers against herself, draws her hand away. “I don’t really… it’s okay.”  
  
Sam doesn’t know what that means, but he can’t get a read on her that well, especially in the dark.  
  
“If you want to, I want to,” Sam says, because he kind of feels like an asshole, otherwise. She licks her lip, presses them together, considering.  
  
“I don’t really like what that feels like.”  
  
And oh, okay, this is a whole other thing. “…Okay,” he says, a little too late. “No, okay.”  
  
“Sorry.”  
  
“No, hey. Don’t be sorry.” He reaches out and pulls her close and she folds right up against him.

**BRIGITTE**

Thursday morning Brigitte wakes up first, but it's too dark to mean she’s going to be late to school. They’ve rolled away from one another slightly, and neither of them bothered to re-dress she remembers as the sheets slide against her bare back. It’s cold — the kind that only exists at five in the morning. She reaches out and tugs softly at the inside of Sam’s elbow, just enough to pull him closer, share body heat, but he rolls right into her arms, just awake enough to get his arm around her. She tucks her head down beneath his, folds herself carefully into his warmth, and sleeps again.  
  
~*  
  
“Brigitte,” he says softly, some time later. She opens her eyes to morning light, and Sam. “School.” he says, voice just-woke-up heavy. “We overslept. You’re gonna be late.”  
  
She squints against the light, against the thought of school again. Groaning she rolls into the pillow, her hair falling forward to completely hide her face.  
  
“C’mon, I’ll drive you.” She doesn’t move. Sam breaks first. He runs his hand down the back of her hair, but doesn’t pull it out of her face the way Pamela always used to, and she likes that.  
  
“I do skip,” she says into the pillow.  
  
“What?”  
  
“I do skip,” she tells him again, turning her head to face him, pushing her own hair back.  “I skipped to see you at the greenhouse that first time.”  
  
“That was different,” Sam says. "You needed help."  
  
“I don’t want to go,” she says, softly.  
  
Sam’s struggling with something, so she goes quiet, leaves him to it. Finally, he says “Look, I don’t wanna tell you what to do. But I also don't want Iris back here again because you're missing days.”  
  
“Guidance told me that my missed days were reset,” Brigitte tells him, and it’s the truth. “She said that what happened made it understandable, and she didn’t believe in punishment for struggling to cope. So… technically I haven’t missed any days. But you could call and tell them I’m sick, if you want to make it more believable.”  
  
“Yeah, and then what?”  
  
She shrugs. “I could help you in the greenhouse. Anything’s better than that place.”

**SAM**

Sam studies her, sheets pulled up high. She’s still missing that ring, he notices. Sighing, he pushes the covers back enough to roll out of bed into the morning chill. “Ugh, fuck,” He finds his clothes, pulls them on.

There’s nothing to be done in the greenhouse today. He’s just got to wait until Spring, now, and there haven’t been any storms, so unless someone calls him to have some tree branches cut back or something, he’s set to be here all day, doing a whole lot of nothing. Those days aren’t so good for his mental health.  
  
He calls school, makes up something about fever, flu, contagiousness, and his eyes hold hers across the room. “There you go, you delinquent," he says, after he hangs up.  
  
She smiles, almost, with just one side of her mouth.  
  
“Fuck,” he says. “It’s freezing. Want coffee?” He moves to fill the kettle in the wide-basin sink.  
  
“Or,” she says, and he turns away from the kitchen and back towards her, shutting the water off to hear her better.

"Huh?"  
  
She hesitates, then says “Come back.”  
  
He’s surprised, but not hard to convince. Setting the kettle down, he gets back under the blankets with her, and he’s immediately warmer. It doesn’t hurt that his heart’s definitely pumping blood faster than it has to be for three steps across the room and back.  
  
She reaches out, scores on the first attempt to touch the scars at his throat, the place his hair curls over the jagged edge of them near his ear, and he takes the hint and kisses her, presses close to her warmth. “Aren’t you contagious?” he teases, and feels her smile just a little.  
  
He really likes kissing her, but they’re lazy this morning, slow. They both drift again, half-way between sleeping and awake, so close their noses brush, mouths barely inches apart. The proximity makes him ache, but it’s in the background of his mind, like she’s her own drug, more potent than pot. It’s a little after nine when she shifts away, stretches, and he’s brought out of a half-doze as she sits up in bed to find her shirt.  
  
“Hey, question. What uh— what is it. That you don’t like?”  
  
“What?” she asks, half twisting back to look at him through frizzing hair. Her hair seems bigger than she is, sometimes. She pulls her shirt on and then climbs over his legs and walks to the TV table where his cigarettes are.  
  
“Last night, you told me you don’t like what it feels like. What were you saying?”  
  
Something like tension leaves her, replaced with this full-bodied sigh, and she rolls her eyes, looking away. “I don’t know. I don’t like… anything being there. Inside me, it’s sick, or something.”  
  
Sam squints at her.  _Sick_? “I…?”  
  
“There’s like…” she crouches to dig her lighter out of her backpack. “It’s like digging into a wound.”  
  
“You mean it hurts?”  
  
“No,” she says, frustrated, standing as she lights the cigarette. “It’s… hasn’t your stomach ever turned when you see someone else’s blood? ‘Cause you can tell like— that they’re losing a lot? Or like when you see someone get really hurt and you can kinda feel it? It’s like that. It doesn’t feel like anything else, it’s just this…” she wrinkles her nose. “Hollow, I dunno. I sometimes think other girls are built different. Like softer, or something.”  
  
He doesn’t know how to respond to that. Here she is, standing in the centre of his room, shrouded in pale winter-light and cigarette smoke saying other girls are built softer. And he can see how she would think it. She’s nothing but narrow limbs and sharp edges at first glance, Sam thinks; skinny as hounds. But he feels like she’s wrong, about this.  
  
“Just feel like it’s only a matter of time before you get fed up with me,” she says, her voice low and jagged. She shelters behind it.  
  
Sam sits up, shaking his head a little. “Hey. No. Here, c’mere,” he says, beckoning her, and she walks over to him, stops. He pulls her down to sit next to him on the edge of the bed. She’s brooding, cigarette held loose between her middle and ring fingers. He takes it from her gently, takes a drag. He’s careful when he puts his arm around her shoulders, pulls her against him. He exhales smoke away from them both, then presses his face into her hair at her temple. “I’m not gonna get fed up with you.”  
  
“You swear?” she asks, soft.  
  
Sam crosses his heart with his cigarette.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The book Brigitte mentions where the protagonist fucks a bear is a real one. It's _Bear_ by Marian Engle, and it's also just... _exactly_ how Brigitte describes it. Like that's it, that's the whole book. Ah, Canadian literature.
> 
> But seriously though, it's a great book. If you'd like to dive into the deeply beautiful, lonely realm of Canadian fiction I CANNOT recommend _Fall on Your Knees_ by Ann-Marie MacDonald highly enough. It's one of my favourite books ever, and probably still the most beautiful book I've ever read. Douglas Glover's _Elle_ is another beautiful meditation on what it means to hold more than one thing inside of you, and it's got an opening scene that's... well... pretty unforgettable. 
> 
> If you're interested in literature depicting more Indigenous, queer, and/or otherwise marginalized peoples in Canada, I definitely recommend Tomson Highway's _Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing_ and Heather Smith's _The Agony of Bun O'Keefe_.
> 
> If you dig poetry, _This Wound is a World_ by Billy-Ray Belcourt is heartbreaking and uplifting and just some of the best damn contemporary poetry I've read in a long while.
> 
> Also, regarding Grade 13. This is something that existed in Ontario until about 2003. It was essentially a prep-year for university, and if you planned to go to uni it was a requirement. Basically this means Ontario high schools would last from grade 9-13, FIVE YEARS, imagine.  
> The girls are probably in Grade 11 at the start of the film, which means that even Ginger is probably one of the youngest in their year if she's "almost sixteen." (The kicker here, too, is that Grade 13 would have been abolished the same year they completed it).
> 
> Brigitte's hoping to graduate early (the following January) from Grade 12 and not attend Grade 13, but because she already showed high academic ability by skipping a grade, teachers would likely have been all over her to get her to do the final prep year.


	8. Chapter 8

**BRIGITTE**

They spend the morning quiet. Sam leaves the TV on low while he strings up branches of marijuana from the ceiling beams to dry, and Brigitte does her school-work, crosslegged on the couch.  
  
They go for a drive up to a corner store in the next county because they won’t run into anyone there. Because they can be strangers. They linger in a truck stop shop looking at weird household trinkets that remind her of Pamela — friendly scarecrows and garden ornaments and tealight candleholders made from a piece of wood that says WELCOME. _To what?_ she wonders. Sam tries on different types of sunglasses — rose-tinted circular ones, yellow hunting glasses. She raises her eyebrows at him, arms crossed, acting judgemental and annoyed, but really, she has to try not to laugh. He puts a huge, floppy straw hat on her head and, with his fingers on her chin to tip her face up to his, tells her she looks cute.  
  
_Cute_. She pretends to stick her finger down her throat, mimes gagging, and Sam laughs and laughs while she untangles herself and her scarf with difficulty from the hat’s drawstring cord and smooths down her hair.  
  
They get back home after dark, which still comes early, this late in February. The room smells like the drying pot, musky and green. It makes her sleepy because it feels safe.

**SAM**

She falls asleep on the couch, all curled up in a ball because it’s barely big enough for two people to sit on, let alone sleep. Still, he covers her with a blanket instead of moving her, and climbs into bed on his own. He leaves the heat on, clicking through the darkness.  
  
It’s lonely, he thinks.  
  
He sleeps until she slides into bed with him around one in the morning, and they find their place in one another’s arms. “Missed you,” he whispers, because it’s true. Even though she was right there, he missed her. He’s never felt like that before.  
  
Friday morning, they get up on time. Or he does. She stays in bed. He makes the coffee and sets both cups on the table. “You’re going to be late.”  
  
“Um. I think I’m still sick,” she says. Sam tilts his head, tongue pressed to his eye teeth to stop the smile.  
  
“You are, huh?”  
  
She shrugs her shoulders.  
  
“Brigitte…” Sam says, about two thirds of the way to a warning.  
  
“It’s Friday,” she coaxes. Then she shifts back, making room for him to come back to the bed.  
  
Sam takes a slow breath against the flip in his stomach, and then says, softly “Oh, this is dangerous.” But he goes, and his tongue grazes against the sharp white grin of her teeth when he kisses her.  
  
The coffee gets cold.

**BRIGITTE**

She gets her hands on him, her fingers around him, with more certainty than she did the first time, and she thinks she knows, now, what it means to dismantle a person, because he tenses and shakes beneath her even though she’s barely touching him. He comes, quietly, his breath hitching into a gasp. He’s left panting and breathless and he meets her eyes and she’s caught in the full brilliance of his smile, his pupils still blown out dark and lovely. Brigitte thinks that she wants to be so blissed. Just once.  
  
Later, both of them starving but unwilling to get up, she rolls onto her back to watch the light toss the shadows of winter branches across the ceiling while Sam traces nonsense patterns on the inside of her thigh, his face pressed into her neck. He never tries to touch her, between her legs where the ache has finally faded again, and she likes that. That she can trust him. That she can relax. She wishes it were easy for her to say things like that out loud. Like that she likes that his teeth are crooked and sort of fucked up, especially on the right side of his mouth. Because Brigitte likes things that are imperfect. Things that other people conveniently overlook, or look at as an inconvenience, she seeks out on purpose, and finds something in it. Maybe beauty.  
  
“Mm, you know,” Sam says, mouth moving against her shoulder, stirring her from her thoughts. “There’s ways to do this without penetration.”  
  
“Please don’t say penetration,” Brigitte says, voice dry as a desert. She’s rewarded with a laugh and he pushes himself up on one elbow to look at her. It’s weirdly intense, so she fumbles for a piece of her hair, draws it across her cheek so she can press it to her mouth with her fingertips, hiding a little.  
  
“I’m not telling you ‘cause I’m getting tired of this, I just— I’m kinda starting to feel like a bit of an asshole here.” He blinks and looks away. “And besides…” he stops himself, reconsidering, and she wants to know, suddenly very badly what he was going to say. “Just, if you wanted to try it. It doesn’t have to be soon, I just… just so you know.”  
  
“Okay. Thanks.”  
  
“Okay.”  
  
~*  
  
Sam takes her to work for nine, and before she gets out of the van, he kisses her, and she spends part of her shift in a daze thinking about all the ways people say goodbye, and whether they are too much or not enough, or maybe just completely non-existent.  
  
She wonders why it’s so hard for someone to say it, however they can, and not get a response.  
  
Fluorescent lights in the bathroom flicker as Brigitte washes her hands. She looks at herself in the mirror and thinks that one day she won’t even be able to picture Ginger beside her, because she, Brigitte, will have been too transformed, will have put too many years between them to ever know what it would have been like with her sister still at her side.  
  
And it sets this ache in her chest that feels a whole lot like guilt again.

**SAM**

She’s strange, later that night. Quiet, distant. He asks her twice, what’s wrong, but he’s brushed off twice with the same dismissiveness. “Okay, fine,” he says, because he knows it’s a lie, and he just catches the sharp, wounded way she looks at him as he turns away, and he feels like a total fucking pice of shit, but it’s not frustration that makes him short with her, it’s anxiety. It’s fear. Because he’s pretty sure that they both have these horrible things burning away inside them. Things that make your heart ache and your mind dark. The kind of thing that Sam still doesn’t know how to fix in himself, let alone someone else.  
  
They don’t really speak in the hour or so between the end of her shift and going to bed. She keeps busy with her school work while he charts where he’s going to move plants, what he’s going to try to fit in the greenhouse for spring — wedding season’s always something that helps drag him out of winter-time debt. When he finally gives up waiting on her and heads to bed, he pauses near the heater thinking that maybe if he asked her now, or the right way, to come to bed with him — just so he could hold her, let her breathe some of that tension out — it would be like an apology.  
  
He opens his mouth but without looking up she says “I’ll turn it down before I go to bed.”  
  
That hurts so much more than he expected it to, but he just says “Okay.”

**BRIGITTE**

Sam’s side of the room goes dark, leaving her in a circle of pale white light from the lamp by the couch and she feels like crying but she doesn’t. She’s not even sure what she’s sad about anymore. Sam and Ginger have gotten all tangled together beneath all these verses she's reading of poetry from the 1800s. And she realizes that somewhere along the way, she became afraid of fighting with Sam, because if she loses him…  
  
And then she thinks that Ginger was safer, but even that wasn’t true. Brigitte always let Ginger get her way, always felt that ripping, tearing anxiety in her gut and in her heart when Ginger was mad at her, and Brigitte gave up _so much of herself_ trying to win her over again, every time.  
  
Every time.  
  
When she can’t read anymore without her eyes itching, she sets the book down and contemplates Sam across the room. It’s late, she can feel it, and he’s sleeping, his back to her, curled up at the very edge of the bed. Leaving space for her.  
  
Or maybe she’s just making that up. She pads across the floor to turn the heat down low, then retreats back to the solitude of the couch. She shuts the light off beside her and pulls the blanket from the back of the couch and huddles beneath it, because she doesn’t think she could bear either forgiveness or rejection right now. She’d rather just put it all off ’til morning, and then, maybe, she can cope.  
  
~*

_Morning and evening_  
_Maids heard the goblins cry:_  
_“Come buy our orchard fruits,_  
_Come buy, come buy…_

Ginger rolls over on the bed with a cigarette burning and her shirt ridden up above her hipbones, and Brigitte thinks that she looks strong and soft in that way only certain girls — but especially Ginge — do. And Brigitte knows that there is no softness on her own body.

_Lizzie met her at the gate_  
_Full of wise unbraidings:_  
_“Dear, you should not stay so late,_  
_Twilight is not good for maidens;_  
_Should not loiter in the glen_  
_In the haunts of goblin men.”_

Brigitte knows, somehow, that the wolf is prowling somewhere. Maybe it’s outside. Maybe it’s a few subdivisions over. Or maybe it’s right outside their basement window, watching as she sterilizes a darning needle over a hot, white flame. Maybe it’s creeping down the long dark hallway, passing the beams of the unfinished walls like trees in a mythical forest.

_“Nay, hush,” said Laura:_  
_“Nay, hush, my sister:_  
_I ate and ate my fill,_  
_Yet my mouth waters still;_  
_Tomorrow night I will_  
_Buy more:” and kissed her._

Ginger says she fucked Jason and didn’t use anything and Brigitte thinks that they will cope because that’s what they always do. She climbs over Ginger’s legs, straddles Ginger’s thighs. _You really think this’ll work?_ Ginger asks her, and Brigitte looks away as Ginger pulls her shirt up higher to expose her belly button, because sometimes, she knows, she looks too long. She’s learned to look away quickly. _We have to try something._

_Day after day, night after night_  
_Laura kept watch in vain_  
_In sullen silence of exceeding pain._  
_She never caught again, the goblin cry:_  
_“Come buy, come buy;”—_

_You should have one, too,_ Ginger says — a ring. Rings, earrings, circles. Brigitte thinks that they all represent eternity in one way or another, and she thinks _I wanted that with Ginger_ and she thinks _one hundred and sixty-eight days until our suicides_. She used to think it was poetic. Now she thinks about how goddamn stupid they are. Were.

_Tender Lizzie could not bear_  
_To watch her sister’s cankerous care_  
_Yet not to share._  
_She night and morning_  
_Caught the goblins’ cry:_  
_“Come buy, come buy:”—_  
_Beside the brook, along the glen,_  
_She heard the tramp of goblin men,_  
_The voice and stir_  
_Poor Laura could not hear;_  
_Longed to buy fruit to comfort her,_  
_But feared to pay too dear._

Brigitte places the needle just so to penetrate Ginger’s soft skin. And Brigitte thinks why here? Ginger breathes under her. Sometimes Brigitte thinks Ginger breathes into her because she’d rather die than be here without her. And maybe it was like that. Once.

_Till Laura dwindling_  
_Seemed knocking at Death’s door:_  
_Then Lizzie weighed no more_  
_Better and worse;_  
_But put a silver penny in her purse…_

_Ready?_ Brigitte asks her. From somewhere else, some other world, other life — outside of the dark purple walls of their bedroom, the close candlelight, the glitter of beaded curtains, Sam whispers _Okay?_ against the line of her jaw and Brigitte responds, _Yes._ Beneath her fingers, Ginger’s stomach rises as she drags off her cigarette. Brigitte feels the shift of her muscles when she twists to put it out. Beneath her, Ginger responds, _Yeah_.

_Laughed every goblin_  
_When they spied her peeping:_  
_Came towards her hobbling,_  
_Flying, running, leaping,_  
_Puffing and blowing,_  
_Chuckling, clapping, crowing,_  
_Clucking and gobbling,_  
_Mopping and mowing,_  
_Full of airs and graces,_  
_Pulling wry faces…_

Brigitte pushes the needle through, and all this heat washes over her and over her and she thinks that maybe this ache inside her could sweeten and spread if she just fucking let herself go, but she doesn’t know how to do that. She doesn’t fucking know how, because everything is buried so deep inside of herself and she’s got walls up she didn’t even know that she built. Ginger is climbing-roses and Brigitte is a barbed-wire fence. Ginger’s living body surrounds her deadness, her sharp exterior. Ginger is what people look at, what people see, and Brigitte longs for that kind of supple, effortless freedom.

_“Give me much and many;”—_  
_Held out her apron,_  
_Tossed them her penny._  
_“Nay take a seat with us,_  
_Honour and eat with us,”_  
_They answered grinning…_

It’s fucked up, she knows. She knows that.

_“Thank you,” said Lizzie: “But one waits_  
_At home for me:_  
_So without further parleying,_  
_If you will not sell me any_  
_Of your fruits tho’ much and many,_  
_Give me back my silver penny_  
_I tossed you for a fee.”—_  
  
_They began to scratch their pates,_  
_No longer wagging, purring,_  
_But visibly demurring,_  
_Grunting and snarling._  
_One called her proud,_  
_Cross-grained, uncivil;_  
_Their tones waxed loud,_  
_Their looks were evil._  
_Lashing their tails_  
_They trod and hustled her,_  
_Elbowed and jostled her,_  
_Clawed with their nails,_  
_Barking, mewing, hissing, mocking,_  
_Tore her gown and soiled her stocking,_  
_Twitched her hair out by the roots,_  
_Stamped upon her tender feet,_  
_Held her hands and squeezed their fruits_  
_Against her mouth to make her eat._

Sam says _Tell me to stop, I stop_ , and Brigitte doesn’t want him to, but Sam, like Ginger, is living things, and Brigitte just cuts herself open trying to get herself to bend.

_Lizzie uttered not a word;_  
_Would not open lip from lip_  
_Lest they should cram a mouthful in:_  
_But laughed in heart to feel the drop_  
_of juice that syruped all her face…_

People in middle school called her a dyke, once, and Ginger had given them a death glare in Brigitte’s defense. _Rather be a lesbian than touch a guy’s junk_ , Ginger had said, but that was a long time ago, now. And Ginger, she changed her mind.

_Worn out by her resistance_  
_Flung back her penny, kicked their fruit_  
_Along whichever road they took,_  
_Not leaving root or stone or shoot;_  
_Some writhed into the ground,_  
_Some dived into the brook_  
_With ring and ripple,_  
_Some scudded on the gale without a sound,_  
_Some vanished in the distance._

Seven years old and dressed for a family Christmas gathering. Relatives called Ginge — in a green taffeta Christmas dress — _so pretty_ and smoothed her hair and chuffed her cheek gently, and then they turned their eyes on her (always a little in the background, all dark staticky velveteen and shoes that cut her heels) and said _hello, Brigitte_ , and smiled plastic smiles and never touched her.

_She ran and ran_  
_As if she feared some goblin man_  
_Dogged her with gibe or curse_  
_Or something worse:_  
_But not one goblin skurried after,_  
_Nor was she pricked by fear;_  
_The kind heart made her windy-paced_  
_That urged her home quite out of breath with haste_  
_And inward laughter._  
  
_She cried “Laura,” up the garden,_  
_“Did you miss me?_  
_Come and kiss me._  
_Never mind my bruises,_  
_Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices_  
_Squeezed from goblin fruits for you,_  
_Goblin pulp and goblin dew._  
_Eat me, drink me, love me;_  
_Laura, make much of me:_  
_For your sake I have braved the glen_  
_And had to do with goblin merchant men.”_

And Ginger says _Yeah, maybe I do see a monster. It’s got these little green eyes…_ and Sam says _Okay, fine_ and Brigitte thinks _what if everyone leaves me?_

_Laura started from her chair,_  
_Flung her arms up in the air,_  
_Clutched her hair:_  
_“Lizzie, Lizzie, have you tasted_  
_For my sake the fruit forbidden?_  
_Must your light like mine be hidden,_  
_Your young life like mine be wasted,_  
_Undone in mine undoing_  
_And ruined in my ruin,_  
_Thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden?”—_  
_She clung about her sister,_

The wolf has found them. But it’s not a couple suburbs over. It’s not outside their window. It’s not even creeping down the hallway. It’s in their room. Brigitte pierces Ginger’s cream-pale skin with the darning needle, and she leans down until she can feel Ginger’s mouth against hers and

_Kissed and kissed and kissed her…_

and her body floods hot, melts between her thighs. The wolf is in their room. It’s in _Brigitte_. When she draws back, panting, finally shaken loose from herself, Ginger’s face is a bloody, demolished mess. One green eye stares up at her, unseeing. Brigitte tastes blood in her mouth. She screams.

**SAM**

She makes this sound like drowning. It jolts panic through him, but he hasn’t even gotten his feet on the floor before she’s shut herself in the bathroom. The lock flips. He can feel his fear flutter against his throat. “Brigitte?!”

**BRIGITTE**

She clutches the sink edge hard in one hand, turns the handle for cold water and lets the sound drown out the way she dry-heaves into the basin. In the bathroom light, she can tell something’s wrong with her vision, like she’s dying. Everything swirls in front of her like heat-waves. Her head _hurts_. She coughs and it triggers her gag reflex and she throws up bile.  
  
“Jesus Christ,” Sam says on the other side of the door. “Brigitte…”  
  
She spits, spits, but she feels wrong. There’s this flickering darkness in her left eye and she presses her hand to it and thinks _What if I’m dying_ , and then she thinks _What if I’m changing?_ She gasps and looks up. She’s very pale, but very human looking. Her eyes are fever-bright. She can see that at least, through the dark spots strobing her vision. Terror and relief flood her at once. If she’s not changing she’s fucking dying.  
  
Her body aches like someone’s hit her right in the stomach, her legs shake.  
  
The knob twists ineffectively at her side and she shuts off the water, then reaches out and finds the lock by feel and opens the door. Sam pushes it open and she turns towards him as he slots himself between her and the door in the cramped space. She says “I can’t see—” and then he’s right there, all around her saying “Jesus, Brigitte, jesus,” and she breaks down into these panicked breaths that might be crying. Might be.  
  
He pulls her down onto the floor with him, or maybe she sinks down and he follows, but she calms down eventually because nothing’s changing, nothing’s getting worse. He holds her close to his chest.  
  
Eventually the lightshow behind her eyes fades, and as she calms down so does the racing of Sam’s heart near her ear, and he asks her if she’s ever had a migraine.  
  
“No?”  
  
“There’s these auras,” he explains. “Does your head hurt?”  
  
And then it’s painkillers and water, always water, and he sits across from her on the bathroom floor, their legs half tangled in the tiny space and says, like it follows at all. “I’m sorry.”  
  
“It’s not your fault,” she says, and she wonders if she’s fucking with him, because she wants his hands in her hair and on her skin, but she doesn’t want him inside her. And she knows what kind of dream that was, with Ginger. She’s never felt that ache release before, but now it’s all tangled up and confused with the pain in her head, the dull twisting in her abdomen.  
  
Sam leans forward over his raised knees and takes her hand, strokes his thumb over her fingers and doesn’t say anything else. He just holds onto her and she wonders what he would think of her if he knew… if he knew about her dream. If he knew about the way her long, surreptitious looks at Ginger weren’t just because she wanted to look like Ginger.  
  
She thinks about saying it now, while they’re still sort-of-not-fighting-sort-of-not- _not_ -fighting, but her head hurts too much to say the words out loud. Eventually Sam suggests bed, because they’re both cold and sore from the bathroom floor tiles and she nods. He helps her up, he murmurs something soft, whispers _sweetheart_ in her ear, and she wonders why he only calls her that when she’s sick.  
  
She doesn’t know what any of this means, but she feels on the cusp of something.  
  
She knows she wants his arms around her like this.  
  
~*  
  
The next morning is Saturday and she feels better, except for a little haziness, and the lingering sick sensation in her gut. She wonders if that confirms she _is_ messed up, inside. She doesn’t think other girls hurt so much after they finally break that ache inside them.  
  
She calls in sick to work because she’s afraid to eat in case she throws up. She’s afraid not to eat in case she passes out while shelving or something.  
  
“Hey. Let’s go for a drive,” Sam says, so they go. He makes toast and makes her bring it, and she eats it slowly in the car. He eats what she can’t, and they go way, way out to the country where they don’t know where they are anymore, and Brigitte likes that he’s willing to get lost with her. He pulls up to a stop sign, at a perfect crossroads — snow-covered farm-land all around, barns falling in on themselves.  
  
“Which way?” she asks.  
  
“Your call.”  
  
She points and he takes her hand. He presses her knuckles to his mouth and goes the way she wants, and she feels like he lit a fire in her, but soft. It’s candlelight.  
  
They take a bridge and the river runs too fast to be frozen. They see deer just along the tree-line at the edge of a long, snowy field.  
  
“I…” she begins “…I had this dream,” and she doesn’t explain it, because the day is grey and soft and so far removed from the vivid colours of last night. “About Ginger.”  
  
She goes down this tangled road of things like Ginger and Jason and how Brigitte thinks that maybe she was jealous. But not like she was jealous at the family Christmas dinner. Not like Pamela thought: that she was just jealous of Ginger’s beauty. It's different from that, but not totally separate.  
  
Sam listens to all of it, and she never once feels like he’s tuned her out.  
  
“…I think I loved her,” Brigitte admits, and it makes her nose sting like tears, and she doesn’t know why. Because that makes it worse, maybe? Because she feels like she’s lived so many lies, and spent so much time being what she thought she was supposed to be, and not what she was.  
  
Fucked up. Monstrous somehow, but at least she would’ve been fucking real. And Sam… Sam at least deserves to know what kind of person she is. And the way she’s said it — _I think I loved her…_ there’s no room to misinterpret.  
  
Sam looks over just for a moment, catches her eyes. He says “I know.”  
  
Brigitte breaks with relief. She presses her hands over her face, pulls her knees up against her chest. He doesn’t stop driving. The noise of the van makes her feel safe, the movement makes her feel like she can stay in this, let it out like poison. No one’s waiting on her to finish whatever this is so they can get on with _their_ life.  
  
The sun breaks from the clouds for the first time that day and they drive through a small town. It’s such a relief from the monotony of the suburbs. They stop somewhere to get gas and cups of coffee and to stretch their legs. They just stand together for a few moments in the station’s parking lot, leaning against the side of the van, clutching the warm paper cups and soaking up that sunlight before it disappears like they’re going to photosynthesize.  
  
“What do you think?” Sam says. “Home?”  
  
_Home_. Brigitte doesn’t know where that place is anymore. But she can’t deny that his definition is the closest thing for her, now.  
  
“… ‘Kay.”

**SAM**

Green things start growing again. March turns into April in an endless, torrential rain, but it melts the snow, at least. It’s always kind of incredible, because it always seems like the snow will stay forever — seems like there’s just so much of it, and it’s so frozen, that it’s just going to be infinite.  
  
Work starts up for Sam again and Brigitte’s like a cat, moving silently in and out of the greenhouse proper with various homework or books. Sometimes he’ll look up and she’s curled up in the chair in what is colloquially referred to as his ‘office’ but really just means ‘place to talk to customers because they can’t come into the back room where there’s an illicit grow op’. Sometimes he’ll say something to her and find her gone again, even though he didn’t hear her leave. She hides from customers, and he doesn’t know if it’s shyness or just unwillingness to deal. Maybe a mix of both.  
  
When they’re alone, though, she hovers, sometimes, watches him work. She’s curious, he knows, but doesn’t ask many questions, so sometimes he tells her things. Walks her though repotting and which plants grow fuller the next year, when you cut them back. Brigitte reminds him of lilacs. He tells her about rare varieties he has or wishes he had, and about watering and sunlight and shade and why some plants survive longer than others without their roots. He tells her about the medicinal properties of dandelions, and how it’s the obsession with tamed, green lawns that made people think they were a weed and so: useless. He tells her about plant names and Latin translations and the language of flowers where irises mean friendship and certain types of tulips mean the recipient has beautiful eyes. She pages through his beat up ancient Latin dictionary one afternoon, trailing him around the greenhouse, reading from it. They trade language back and forth. He names the plants in English and she finds their translations. Her voice, he thinks, is like summer: soft and unhurried.  
  
By the end of April, most things are in full bloom and Brigitte knows the names for them in English and Sam tries to remember them in Latin, and it becomes a game.  
  
“Common daisy.”  
  
_“Bellis perennis.”_  
  
“Baby’s breath.”  
  
_“Gypsophila paniculata.”_  
  
Her heavy sweaters end up slung over the backs of chairs or shoved into her school bag as the weather gets warmer. In the place of wool skirts and turtlenecks are these long cotton dresses that look like they’re circa the Great Depression. She has open-front sweaters that look like they’re woven out of cobwebs, loose-knit and easily ripped. The hems of them unravel. She’s constantly twisting threads around her fingers and pulling them free.  
  
4x6 photographs appear of the plants in the greenhouse, and some taken outside on her way to or from school, with their names in two languages scribbled on the back. He finds out that she develops them at the booth at the grocery store on her way home from school. They turn up as bookmarks, some water-stained from cups on the table. He takes one that she took of dandelions, white and full with seeds, and her handwritten-in-Sharpie _taraxacum officinale_ , and pins it to the visor of his van. It reminds him of her.  
  
“Forget-me-nots.”  
  
_“Myosotis sylvatica.”_  
  
“Yarrow.”  
  
“Ahhh… fuck.”  
  
“It’s _achillea millefolium_.”  
  
She has a fondness for wild things. Things you find on roadsides and the cracks of pavement in forgotten places.  
  
“Lupins.”  
  
_“Lupinus perennis.”_  
  
“Hemlock.”  
  
_“Conium maculatum.”_  
  
~*  
  
She comes home from school on the last day in June with everything from her locker in a heavy-looking bag slung over her shoulder. She drops it to the floor with a thud and sits down on top of it heavily, huffing out a breath.  
  
It’s hot out. She’s flushed, her hair is frizzing more than usual. Through the cigarette hanging from his lips, Sam huffs a laugh and says. “I could have driven you.” He watches her undo the buttons of her sweater which she’s fastened up to the neck. Beneath it, she’s wearing this patterned white and blue dress that reaches almost to her ankles. There’s burrs caught in the lace there. Weird. Sam makes a note of that as she shrugs out of the sweater, shaking her head to his suggestion. He thinks it’s strange to see her in such a pale colour. It makes her eyes look greener. Sam goes still, standing there with his cigarette and his spade dangling from one hand, and his eyes on her.  
  
She looks up and the air seems to charge between them — the moment before lightning. Brigitte takes a breath and looks away, dragging open the side pocket of her bag, shifting her weight on it to reach. “I got you something,” she says, dragging out her wrinkled report card envelope and dropping it onto the floor followed by a handful of yellow flowers which she extracts much more carefully and holds out to him.  
  
He reaches out and takes them. “Are you flirting with me?” Sam asks, and he’s rewarded with this disgusted look.  
  
“I don’t flirt,” she says. “Are they right?”  
  
“It’s St. John’s Wart.”  
  
“You didn’t plant any,” she says. “I thought…”  
  
“Where did you get these?”  
  
“Off the 403. There’s a bunch up by the trees. It’s like far enough away from the road that they’re probably not all fucked up by car fumes and stuff.”  
  
“Yeah I was going to ask…” he says, pointing the flowers at the burrs in her skirt. She picks at them, dropping her eyes. She walked all the way out there, with all her school shit, to pick these for him. Sam thinks it might be the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for him. Sam steps close and crouches down in front of her, leaning in to kiss her just beside her mouth. “Thank you,” he says.  
  
Later, in the orange-gold glow of sunset filtering in through the west windows of the greenhouse, he kisses her properly. He backs her up against the wooden filing shelf where he’s got pots of smaller plants: cacti, asparagus ferns, lucky bamboo, and oxtails. He holds her waist, and when he presses against her, she presses back.

**BRIGITTE**

She watches Sam make a tincture from the petals later that evening. It won’t be ready for several weeks. Sam washes some amber glass bottles he digs out of a cupboard to put it in when it’s ready.  
  
“What’s your school stuff say? You ace everything?” he asks, returning to the couch to sit down with her. And she feels restless without any of her schoolwork to do, restless in this space suddenly, and she twists her rings on her fingers. Sam runs a hand down over the back of her hair, and she shuts her eyes beneath it. After a moment, she leans into him and hears him take a soft breath, the way he does when she surprises him.  
  
She thinks about how guidance called her down today. About how the PA system asking her to go to guidance started this panicked, screaming pitch in her head. She had to tell herself with every step down the empty halls that no one was dead in there, no one was dead… In the end, the reason they called her in was to tell her that they really wanted her to reconsider doing grade thirteen. The vice principal was also there. They looked at her with those worried, pitying expressions adults have. They told her wouldn’t be able to go to university without it, that she showed so much promise, that she was on her way to graduating with honours. It all just washed over her as she sat opposite them, along with waves of relief that this was just normal stuff. Normal life stuff. She thinks about how she felt when she got to the 403 highway that afternoon. How she looked through the haze of heat as all the cars passed — four lanes of traffic and such a long, long stretch of field at the edge of it, as far as the eye could see. This, she thought, must be like looking at the ocean. She thought _I could just keep going until I’m somewhere else_. But in the end she couldn’t. Because of Sam. Because she had this armful of yellow flowers for him.  
  
She lets out her own breath. “Hey,” she says, without answering his question. “Where would we’ve gone? If we left on Halloween?”  
  
Sam’s fingers keep running over her hair, and he’s quiet for a while. “I dunno,” he says, finally. “Where would you?”  
  
“I wouldn’t have left.”  
  
“If you did.”  
  
“…I dunno either.”  
  
“You still want to go?” Sam asks.  
  
She scoffs. “Where?”  
  
They’re quiet again. Sam digs his fingers into the thickness of her hair and works out tangles. He smells familiar — but also like soap and cigarettes. There’s this lingering smell of the flowers on his fingers: like salt and something sweeter, almost hay-like. She takes a breath and says “Hey…” again.  
  
“Hm.”  
  
“I think you should try what you said before.” It was weeks and weeks ago now, she knows. Maybe he doesn’t even remember. Since then, she’s only touched him again once. It was still back before the snow had melted — and she’d wanted more than just the heat under his skin and his lips on her neck. He doesn’t leave marks on her on purpose, she thinks, but she feels his jaw shake, sometimes, like he wants to.  
  
When he gets it, when he remembers _ways to do this, without penetration_ , she feels his understanding run like a line of tension through his body, and Brigitte twists so she’s facing him better, and his fingers fall from her hair. She meets his eyes, forces herself to hold them, and he’s caught up in her for a moment.  
  
“Yeah?” he asks, “Is that what you want?”  
  
She doesn’t know how to answer that because it’s yes and no at once. “I was just thinking… d’you ever feel like you’re caught in a loop. Doing the same thing over and over?”  
  
“I mean, yeah.” Sam kind of waves to the room, his life here in the place he calls the family crypt. And then his gaze falls on some of her flower pictures on the table as he asks her, “Why, s’it making you stir crazy? That’s not always a good reason to be reckless.”  
  
“Maybe it’s better to be reckless than the alternative,” she says, coaxing, and that gets his eyes back on hers.  
  
“What’s the alternative?” he asks her.  
  
“Being like a dead end. Where nothing changes.”  
  
“You’re not a dead end.”  
  
But Brigitte feels like she needs to shake these old pieces of herself off like a shed skin. She feels so heavy, sometimes. There’s only so many pieces of other people and old understandings and broken promises that she can hold at once. Sam tells her she’s not a dead end but she feels like one, and she wonders, _how do you know that?_

**SAM**

Brigitte stands up and Sam follows her with his eyes. She reaches down and pulls her dress up past her thighs, past her stomach. She’s not wearing a bra and she drops her dress on the floor like it means something. His breath catches in his chest. “Oh— right now.” But he stands up fast because he can see her wavering, second-guessing her last move already. He takes her hands, pulls her one step closer. He doesn’t kiss her until she touches him first, her fingers curling in his shirt at his waist.  
  
He pulls his shirt off on their way to the bed where he lies down first, pulls her over him. When she leans down to kiss him again, her bird skull necklace falls forward, knocks against the part in his collar bone that’s missing. He stops her before their mouths meet. A piece of her hair falls forward against his cheek. They’re outside the circle of light of the lamp across the room, but it illuminates half her face so that one eye looks green, the other black. She’s harshly beautiful. He wants to tell her. “Hey…”  
  
“What?”  
  
Maybe he loses his nerve. “I…” He pushes her hair back, tucks it behind her ear.  
  
And Brigitte must feel like this is a part that she doesn’t get, but Sam knows that no one really gets anything. Maybe they all just pretend to — practice this mask of _I know what I’m doing_ which eventually becomes _I’m no longer curious_ becomes uprooting every valuable thing inside of a human being just because it’s vulnerable.  
  
“D’you normally talk this much?” she teases, all sarcasm. He thinks he could taste that bittersweet flavour on her tongue but instead he just laughs softly, then switches their places so he’s above her, playful, his hands on her shoulders for a moment. Her knees come up, instinctively protective, but she’s the one that reaches down to undo his pants. He sheds them, and his underwear. Brigitte’s still wearing hers — dark, boyish. She’s seen him naked enough times that it doesn’t make him nervous anymore, but he’s never seen her. She looks smaller, not swathed in too-big shorts and shirts. Kneeling between her legs, he discovers that her hip bones fit perfectly in palms, and that etches itself right into his ribcage.  
  
She reaches down to push her underwear off, but he stops her, “Wait, wait.” She furrows her brow and he kisses her cheek, her mouth. “Tell me to stop, I stop,” he reminders her.  
  
Slowly, so she can follow his path, he slides his fingers down over the front of the cotton fabric, his fingertips sliding over the the hardness of her pubic bone into the softer place below it. He presses there, gently, fingers in a v-shape that misses her clit on purpose.  
  
He keeps his eyes on her face. She’s got hers shut, but he measures the space between her breaths, the shallowness of them. Her mouth is soft, half-open. He catches the white glint of her teeth. He’s slow, taking his time with this, letting her acclimate. He presses a little harder, rocks his fingers against her so that her own soft skin slides against the sides of her clit rather than his fingers which are toughened from years of work. Her breathing gets shallower.  
  
He wants to kiss her again, but he doesn’t, he lets her focus where she wants to, needs to. She presses her hands down into the mattress and holds on tight to the blankets, and then she pushes up into his hand. It’s almost involuntary. Almost. Her eyes flicker open and find his. The next time Sam slides his hand over her, it’s over her clit through the fabric of her underwear, and she makes this sound, grits it out between her teeth.  
  
“Okay?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
He kisses her shoulder, finds this rhythm that gets her stomach muscles tensed and keeps it. For a second, just the space of half a breath, she covers her eyes with her hand, and he slows way down.  
  
“What’s up?”  
  
“Nothing, just gimmie a second.”  
  
He gives her a second, two seconds, then, “Hey, no. You gotta talk to me. Brigitte. Look at me.”  
  
She does.  
  
“Tell me.”  
  
“It’s like it’s good and then it’s too much. I dunno.” She exhales. “Sorry.”  
  
“Don’t. You don’t need to be sorry.”  
  
“This was my idea.”  
  
“You can change your mind.”  
  
She exhales frustration, drags her hands down through her hair. “It was good for a minute.”  
  
“You want to try something else?”  
  
“…Okay.”  
  
Sam presses in close, lingers at her mouth before he kisses her softly, once. When he draws back, he touches her hip, pushes the fabric of her waistband down a centimetre or two; “Can I?” and she nods. He draws her underwear down her legs and off. She’s still got her socks on, her bird skull necklace. He touches her ankle and draws his hand up the underside of her calf to the back of her knee. Eventually, fingers trailing the length of her body, he finds her hip and cups it in his hand again. She meets his eyes.  
  
“I really like you, Brigitte.”  
  
“Um, thanks.”  
  
He laughs, half-hurt, half genuinely amused. He brushes his knuckles against her lower abdomen, then lets his fingers slip into the dark, almost-soft hair between her legs.

**BRIGITTE**

She shouldn’t have said it like that. She thinks, maybe, it was supposed to be a joke, or maybe she really is just that much of an idiot.  
  
“Sam—” she begins, but then his fingers are against her and she gasps sharp, legs going tense.  
  
“Just this,” he soothes, “That’s all.” He isn’t moving, but he’s touching all these inner parts of her without even being inside her. It’s impossibly intimate — somehow made more so by how still they are. Sam presses his face into her neck, inhales.  
  
After what feels like forever, he starts moving so slow. It pulls a little, his skin against hers, but then he draws away from her to slip his fingers into his mouth and touches her again, and this time, it’s so soft. She presses her palm to his chest and pushes him back enough to kiss him. He makes this sound against her mouth that turns what he’s doing between her legs into something hotter so that when he brushes against her entrance, she doesn’t flinch away. She trusts him, and he doesn’t go any further than that. They kiss slowly, but Sam deepens it, deepens it again and he makes these languorous almost figure eights against her, feather-light, until something in her shivers from tension and this longing ache. Everything is quiet. The kiss ends after a moment, the touch stops and when he draws away from her, just a little, she feels disoriented.  
  
And then Sam says, softly, “Oh. Shit.”  
  
She looks. He slides blood between his fingers and it takes her a minute, because nothing hurts— oh. Brigitte gasps, sitting up so fast she almost butts heads with him. She slides her fingers between her legs and they come away wet with blood. “ _Fuck!_ ”  
  
“Jesus,” says Sam, who’s jerked back to avoid a collision. His hands hover, not certain what to do.  
  
_It started…_ she thinks. From somewhere far away, she hears Sam say her name. She doesn’t answer. She feels dazed. Slowly she moves to get up but doesn’t know what for. She doesn’t have any pads or anything — without Pamela around, she’s almost forgotten she was in for this. Her chest feels tight, this fear that tightens like a vice and she looks up sharply, scans the room like she half expects something to leap at her from the shadows at any moment.  
  
“Wait, hey—” He catches the inside of her knee, stopping her from leaving the bed. “Are you okay? What’s up?” He follows her panicked gaze and, like her, sees nothing. Sam’s struggling to catch up.  
  
“It attacked Ginger when she got her period. It smelled the blood on her…” And then Brigitte’s explaining that night — the playground, their bedroom afterwards, the broken Polaroid camera. Everything quiet about the evening is ruined. There’s this high pitched whirring in her head like a distant scream, but endless. She presses shaking fingers to her mouth, her bloodied hand between them. “What if it starts like this? What if the cure doesn’t work?”  
  
“We _know_ the cure works. It’s been _months_ , Brigitte. Almost a year. This is just… it’s normal, I think. It’s okay. We’re safe. We’re okay.”  
  
She gets up, maybe to preserve the bedsheets, maybe because sitting there makes her feel cornered in this space. That’s a mistake. Blood slides down her leg fast, heated. She touches it with her fingers to stop it, but there's — _oh god_ , there's a lot. She feels like crying, like she can’t move. She searches for something else instead of feeling so fucking helpless and comes up with anger, but that was Ginger’s thing. She just feels emptied, betrayed.  
  
Sam’s looking at her like he doesn’t know how to react to her crisis which is maybe fair because it all kind of feels like that scene from _Carrie_ only Brigitte doesn't get superpowers that come with the curse. And this is outside of Sam's world and she feels so separate from him suddenly, when she didn’t before. Ginger would have known what to do for her. Ginger always knew, until she didn’t.

Sam says, “Hey, you— you’ve had this before, right? What’s wrong?”  
  
She takes a sharp breath, trying to steady herself, shakes her head, then says “Jason got it. Bleeding like this. Fuck, it's _a lot_. When Ginger got infected there was a lo—”  
  
“ _Brigitte_ , Jason’s cured. This isn’t— that’s not happening to you, okay? It’s just your period or whatever. Normal biology. Why’re you so freaked?”  
  
_Normal biology_. Only it doesn’t feel like hers, her period, her body. Maybe it never has. Not before the wolf, not before this...

“Shit. Fuck, okay. I’ll—” he stands up, starts getting dressed.

“What're you doing?”

“I’ll go to the drug store and get you something for it, okay?”  
  
She gasps sharply. “You can’t leave me here alone, what if it finds me?” because that dream she had, the wolf outside? It feels real again. What if she’s literally just walking bate? What if it finds Sam, because her blood is drying on his fingers?

**SAM**

In the end, they clean up and go out together. She’s not wearing the same dress because it’s white, she might ruin it, but between sweat pants, one of Sam’s hoodies, and toilet paper rolled up as a makeshift pad to stop the blood, they step out into the night less than ten minutes later. The air is heavy, like a storm’s coming. He walks around to her side to let her in because she’s watching the tree-line with this wide-eyed, frightened gaze, and she follows his path around the front of the truck to the driver’s seat with the same look. She looks small in there, and he feels sorry for her. He feels sick with sympathy for Ginger on Halloween. His fingers absently trace the dented front of his van, because suddenly there’s more to this story of almost hitting two girls running like hell and then hitting a creature that wasn’t human. There’s all these moments that existed out there in the woods, and he understands suddenly, exactly why Brigitte calls this thing, this transformation, the curse.  
  
He searches for her hand in the dark, has to get his fingers into the long sleeves of his sweater, but then he holds on. The drug store’s close enough. The last time he was here in the middle of the night was for Advil for her fever. He parks as close as he can to the lit entrance.  
  
“Coming in?”  
  
She nods. The parking lot is deserted, fucking creepy.  
  
He pulls the handle to pop the door and she says “Do you think I’m a burden?”  
  
Sam turns back and looks her straight in the eye. “No,” he says. And that’s that. He meets her halfway around the front of the truck, and takes her hand again, as they step into this world of bright fluorescents. She doesn’t pull away. The woman at the counter is filing her nails with this huge Slushie beside her. She barely looks at them as they come in.  
  
They both kind of know where they’re going. The speakers play something distinctly disco. She presses her hand for her forehead and stares at the wall of “feminine hygiene” with this expression that says _I’m doomed._  
  
Sam wonders why they call it ‘hygiene’ which indicates cleaning something to prevent disease. Old tuberculosis hospitals like the abandoned ones way out in the countryside practiced ‘hygiene’. The words ‘sanitary napkins’ on the sides of some of the packages rubs him the wrong way, too. Sanitation, purity. The opposite of sanitized is unclean.  
  
“You ever think about how this labelling system is kinda fucked up?”  
  
“This whole experience is actually like I’ve stepped into a hell hole” she responds. She grabs a package of something and holds it at her side like she doesn’t want it touching her, then stomps toward the cash. Sam follows.  
  
He grabs a hot water bottle off a low shelf on the way.  
  
“What’s that for?”  
  
“Trust me,” he says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poetry excerpts are from Christina Rosetti's _Goblin Market_ (1862) which can be found here in its entirety. 
> 
> https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44996/goblin-market
> 
> If you're beginning to think I'm just here to foist my love of Victorian and various other literature upon you, you're not wrong.
> 
> As previously stated, a good portion of the character's thoughts/dialogue is pulled directly from Karen Walton's early drafts of the script for the film.


	9. Chapter 9

**BRIGITTE**

It’s late by the time they get back. She cleans herself up with toilet paper damp from the tap because she’s too exhausted to shower. The pads are uncomfortable, but she knew at the drug store that she wasn’t about to try and figure out tampons right now. Or like. Ever. The whole idea of them kind of disturbs her.  
  
Sam’s sitting on the bed sideways with his back to the wall, smoking the end of a joint he must have started earlier that morning. She sits beside him, close enough that their arms brush, and thinks about how it feels safe. Somewhere far away, thunder rumbles.  
  
She watches Sam exhale all the smoke he’s holding in his lungs slow, coughing slightly as he leans over and puts the joint out in the ashtray. She wishes there was a way to tell him all these things she’s got inside herself without saying them out loud, because it feels cheap, if she just repeats, and he always beats her to it.  
  
He traces the scar on her hand where it rests on the bedspread, touches the finer, faded ones below it. “How did you get these?” he asks.  
  
“It’s the pact,” she tells him. “We were eight.” She raises her hand to examine those old scars. “You can barely see them anymore.”  
  
“Not that it’s any of my business,” Sam says, “But where the fuck were your parents?”  
  
Brigitte rolls her eyes. “Pamela and Henry were pretty easily satisfied. They didn’t want to know what we were doing.”  
  
“That’s fucked up.”  
  
“It’s whatever,” she says, and then “Sorry if I ruined this.”  
  
“You didn’t. It’s just blood, fuck knows you’ve seen me bleed before.”  
  
Sam, covered in blood and the sharp, acrid scent of bile as it dripped from his mouth. She hates how easy it is to find herself right back there in her old basement. She hates that she can remember it so clearly. She’s also terrified to forget. She wraps her arms around herself and wonders if she’ll ever be able to distinguish physical pain from emotional wreckage or if they’ll always be intertwined — one and the same.  
  
“Does it hurt?” he asks, changing the subject.  
  
“It’s starting to.”  
  
“The hot water bottle will help,” he tells her.  
  
And Brigitte stares at it, still in the plastic bag on the coffee table, and wonders why Pamela told her everything about her ‘miracle of nature’ and nothing about how to stop it from tearing her up inside. Pamela knew all the places it would hurt, but apparently decided to never divulge what to actually do about any of it.  
  
“Trina tell you that?” she asks finally. There’s no malice in it.  
  
“Yup.”  
  
“You know a lot of stuff,” Brigitte says, maybe to soften what she’d just said, maybe a genuine compliment.  
  
“So do you,” Sam says.  
  
Rain starts up a soft drumming on the roof that gets harder. Lightning flashes over the greenhouse out front and illuminates the paper windows. The lights flicker.  
  
Brigitte gets off the bed and finds her lighter. She lights the black pillar candle. The half-burnt-down white tapers are in a drawer and she lights them too, finding places for them around the room because she’s unwilling to be left in the dark, bleeding like a beacon in the night for anything out there that’s hungry. She sets the pillar on the bench at the end of the bed and then crawls back onto the mattress beside him, huddled way down, pressing her forearms into the ache inside her.  
  
“Hey,” Sam says. “It’s, um. That’s late isn’t it? For you to start, I mean.”  
  
She shrugs. “I guess. Pamela wanted us to go… I dunno… have a doctor look. But we always escaped.”

**SAM**

She says _escaped_ like she’s telling a fairy-tale. Sometimes listening to Brigitte talk about the past is like hearing the story of conjoined twins. Everything, always, is ‘we.’ He can’t even imagine how she’s been coping with ‘I’ all this time.  
  
“You’re not worried about it?” he asks her, because if she is, he wants to fix it, make sure she’s okay.  
  
She hesitates. “No… See how it goes, I guess. If it’s defective, can I send it back?”  
  
He laughs. She’s huddled so far down the wall beside him, she’s practically lying down, her shoulders all hunched up. “Here,” he says, “C’mere,” and pulls her, more of a suggestion than anything and she resists for a second, but then goes, resting her head on his lap, shifting her shoulder down so that it’s not digging so hard into his hip. The thing about Brigitte, he’s come to understand, is that she likes touch, likes closeness, but she’s only used to it from Ginger. Ginger, he thinks, was the only person that ever really touched her, held her, and that fucking hurts him; not because he’s jealous, but because he really sort of fucking _hates_ everyone who didn’t.  
  
“Do you think the infection changed anything?” she asks, voice low, “Like… cells, DNA?”  
  
It’s occurred to him, but he tries not to think about it. “I don’t know. Maybe all those weird things science can’t explain is because—”  
  
“People are turning into werewolves?”  
  
“Basically, yeah. Yeah, I dunno, Brigitte.” He gets his hand into her hair and smoothes it back from her temple and behind her ear, over and over. She shuts her eyes for a moment, exhaling something like tension.  
  
She doesn’t let her guard down for long though, except when she sleeps, and he thinks the guard isn’t against him so much as it’s against herself. She never really gives herself over to anything outside of herself, not completely. Maybe to Ginger, but he wouldn’t know about that. She shifts a little, disrupting the rhythm of his touch, eyes flickering open again as she says “Maybe getting the rag means I’m not messed up.”  
  
He furrows his brow at her but then the lights go out, scaring them both. Their eyes adjust quickly with the candles burning. “Damn it,” he says. Both of them scan the room, but there’s nothing. No monsters. They’ve just scared themselves, like kids telling ghost stories. “ ‘Messed up’…” Sam repeats, getting back on track. He remembers her, back in the winter, saying that she felt like she was hollow, harder. He doesn’t think so, but hey, maybe she’s right. What does he know? “Why do you think that?”  
  
She hesitates, then says. “Sometimes it’s like… I only got halfway to girl, and then the chromosomes just _gave up_.”  
  
The way she says it makes him laugh. She twists to give him a look from beneath her hair and says “That’s definitely not funny. I’m totally fucked.”  
  
“You’re not.”  
  
Brigitte looks away, almost rolls her eyes, then twists onto her back on the mattress, her head still against his leg and he suddenly has no idea what to do with his hand. “How do _you_ know?”  
  
“I don’t.” He settles for finding hers where it rests against her ribs, sliding his thumb over her index finger where her ring is still missing. It’s been months since then. Time’s been moving so strangely, lately. “But I think you’re fine.”  
  
“Maybe you just want me to be normal,” Brigitte says, “so that it’s easier.”  
  
“Or maybe I don’t,” Sam says, and it’s true. She’s the only person he’s ever actually connected with. He was starting to think that other people like him… people who struggled through society as though they were alien, who had to try so hard just to be a goddamn functioning person in public day-to-day, who _thought_ about stuff, who were critical and curious and questioning of things that the world just seemed to take for granted — that they didn’t exist. It’s so much harder, Sam thinks, to be a person than it is to be a human being. He draws her hand up and presses his lips to the scar that cuts across her palm, then just barely draws away. He watches her considering him, never quite full on meeting his eyes. The backs of her fingers still rest against his cheek where he’s got her hand, but they’re both equally holding the contact. Her eyes are so dark. There’s about a thousand thoughts behind them, and Sam’s as still as he can make himself. She uncurls her fingers so slowly, and they’re not shaking but he can feel her uncertainty as she touches his hair, his earlobe. It’s so soft, but it’s this touch with purpose, and Sam thinks it’s infinitely more intense when it’s like this, and not just the typical mechanics of ‘sex’. _This_ means so much more. He doesn’t even think he’s breathing. But he has to ask: “Do you really think _I’m_ so normal?”  
  
She takes a full breath before she responds, softly, “No. But you pretend better than me.”  
  
“And thanks to that, I’m dead inside,” he says in this bitterly light-hearted tone. Like a joke. Partially.  
  
Brigitte pulls her hand away and says “You’re not.” Dead serious. “You—” She cuts herself off.  
  
“What?”  
  
“…It’s stupid.”  
  
He doesn’t push her. After a moment, Brigitte says, so close to a whisper it’s almost raspy, “But you could tell, right?”  
  
“Tell what?”  
  
“I mean you could tell if I… wasn’t.”  
  
He squints at her, hesitating, because they’re talking about something else now. “If you’re not… _normal_?”  
  
She just looks at him. He doesn’t know what to say, though, and eventually she moves to sit up, but he catches her shoulder to hold her there, gentle. “What’re you asking?”  
  
“Just… couldn’t you—? Like, if you checked, you could tell.”  
  
Sam takes a breath, too sharp. Only the candlelight and shadows move. “I dunno, Brigitte…”  
  
She looks away, all over frustration, humiliation. “Okay,” she says, and Sam thinks _shit_.  
  
“Just— what if I’m wrong?”  
  
“I don’t need you to analyze it in a lab, I just… want to know if I feel like others girls do or… not.”  
  
He searches her face, what he can see of it now that she’s turned it away from him, because this is something else altogether from what they were doing earlier, when she started to bleed. He understands what she’s doing suddenly, in a rush. This is the kind of shit you only ask people you trust implicitly. This is being young enough to mix your blood with someone else’s without any understanding of the dangers of disease or infection or _excuses_ that adults make in order to not be tied to anything or anyone completely. This is her understanding absolutely — in the way he’d almost forgotten — the ties moments like this create. Unbreakable ties. Til death do us part.  
  
And she knows that intimately, too. She’s not doing this lightly. As though someone like Brigitte ever could.  
  
And Sam doesn’t make promises or feel most things as deeply as he did when he was younger. Brigitte, though: Brigitte’s been isolated from the rest of the world, sheltered by a sister who protected her as fiercely as she hurt her. She’s opening herself up to him, or at least preparing herself to. And he gets it. This is blood-oath stuff, her asking this. She’s asking him as someone she trusts, she’s asking him as a friend to do this for her. It’s not alluding to anything else, it’s a completely different form of intimacy. This means something in a way sex could never. This is her bleeding for him and waiting to see if he’d be willing to do the same.  
  
But then… he already has. He’s already bled for her, in her basement last fall.  
  
“Okay,” he says, quietly. “Come here.” She pushes herself up to sitting, and he re-positions himself. “How do you want to do this?” he asks.

**BRIGITTE**

She says, “I don’t know,” because she suddenly realizes they never exactly clarified _how_ — how he would do this. And then she realizes that the only thing that scares her is Sam backing out of this with her. Or discovering that she is, in fact, wrong somehow.  
  
She kind of didn’t expect him to get it, where she was going with this, but the way he’s looking at her tells her he does. “Your call, Brigitte,” he says, and so she lies down against the pillow, because she wants her back against something solid, and not to the flickering darkness of the room, or the rainstorm outside.  
  
He moves over her, not really touching, but when he lowers himself, he’s more beside her than anything else and she realizes she opened this up so that he could fuck her, if he wanted to, but he doesn’t. This is his choice. And maybe somewhere inside herself knows that she needs it to be like this, the first time. That she needs to know what she’s getting into before she’s overwhelmed by the expectations that come with sex: from her, from Sam, from fucking society, as though it’s anyone else’s business. And maybe, also, get a grasp on what it means to lose it, because… she thinks maybe nobody really knows.  
  
He always touches her close to where he ends up, letting her know, letting her prepare. She’s never felt like she’s caught off guard, and it’s the same now. He touches her hip, her stomach, before he slides his hand down beneath the fabric of her clothes, and he is so careful.  
  
His fingers slide against her, where the bleeding makes her slick, but it’s his eyes on her that makes her shake. “Ready?”  
  
When she and Ginger were little, they played this game where they would close their eyes and fall backwards, and the other one would catch them. She remembers that, once, Ginger didn’t, and how it was the betrayal that cracked the air straight out of her lungs more than the shock of hitting the ground. And Ginger had dropped down to her knees beside her, laughing and said _Whoops! Got distracted. Why didn’t you at least catch yourself?_ And Brigitte — she felt like her bones were squeezing in on themselves, in around her chest, because Ginger had just told her at the beginning of this game that she would always be there to look out for her. That was the point. But, still, when Ginger offered her hand to help her up, Brigitte took it.  
  
This is a trust fall, too.  
  
“Yeah,” Brigitte says.  
  
He presses one finger inside her, gentle. Still, she’s tense and he has to nudge her legs apart a little, but he doesn’t tell her to relax. Thank god, because _how?_ Brigitte wonders. How do you relax when you let someone else inside you? Most guys won’t ever understand this.  
  
It doesn’t hurt. He has two fingers inside her now, she thinks, and she expected it to hurt, but it doesn’t. Still, the nausea she expected comes on. It’s the same as when she tried this herself. She squeezes her eyes shut and holds her breath. Sam’s free hand comes up to cradle her head, and the way he’s lying against her means she’s in this soft circle of him. “Keep breathing,” he tells her, and she opens her eyes to find his eyes on her and _oh, god_ , that’s a lot. She grabs hold of his shoulder, clenches her fingers in his shirt. He stops moving altogether. “Shh…”  
  
She breathes. It only kinda helps.  
  
“Hurt?” Sam asks.  
  
“Not really. Keep going.”  
  
Sam presses his lips to her forehead, and that helps, somehow. He pushes further inside, slowly. She lets go of his shirt and holds his shoulder, tight, digs her fingers into the solidness of him. She breathes. It’s better, she thinks, when she’s not surrounded by her own sensation, her own body around herself. With Sam, when it’s Sam inside of her, she can feel the way she fits around him.  
  
Not hollow.  
  
He goes as far as he can, his other fingers press up against her body, and then he’s still, almost cradling her there between her legs, a pressure inside of her. “You’re fine,” he whispers.  
  
She rests her forehead against his chest, exhaling in a rush. Neither of them move. She’s fine. She’s fine. The nausea fades and now she wonders if it was ever connected to the touch at all, or just the idea. That she was somehow… wrong. Monstrous.  
  
He lets out this soft, tight sigh that’s on the edge of something else. “What does it feel like?” she asks, curious, but very quiet. What is it between the ache and the warm melting of coming that this is all about?  
  
Sam swallows. She hears it where she’s still resting her head against him. He nuzzles into her hair and finally says “Soft.” That’s not what she expected, but she likes it, the way it sounds in his mouth.  
  
“Okay?” he asks, and when she nods against him, he draws out, just as slow, but it’s uncomfortable enough to border on pain. She makes a sound.  
  
“Sorry—” He lets her go so that he can withdraw his hand without getting blood on her stomach or her clothes, and they draw apart a little.

**SAM**

He meets her eyes, because it feels like a moment. Sam thinks _You’ve seen me bleed before._ And now he’s seen her. He thinks maybe he’s starting to really see her, beneath all these inauthentic layers she’s got up around herself. Around who she really is, or might be.  
  
“What?” she asks, eyes flickering between his hand and his eyes. And Sam thinks that she’s so different from anyone he’s ever met. He thinks that she maybe doesn’t see the beauty in that, only the rebellion. But Brigitte knelt at his side in a basement like a forest eight months ago and scooped his blood into her mouth with her fingers while they both thought he was dying. She thinks that that makes her a monster. Sam thinks that it’s not about choosing Ginger over him, really, but that it’s more that she made a decision she thought was right, she tried to fulfill a promise to a sister.  
  
She doesn’t get how he could understand that, at least on some level.  
  
But he has. He _does_. And now he’s got her blood on his fingers, only hers is life-giving, it’s tied to nature in a way that his bleeding out onto basement concrete wasn’t. He thinks maybe he could close this circle between them with something better, something healing, so that she doesn’t have to keep coming back to that moment she considers a betrayal.

**BRIGITTE**

She picks up on what he’s thinking, somehow, even though he doesn’t answer her. And she’s still half caught up in how she trusts him _so much_ more than she thought she could ever trust another person — a person who wasn’t Ginger — and how he did this for her because she asked him to, and didn’t try to turn it into something else, and how he didn’t shy away from what might have been wrong, somehow, or from the way she’s bleeding. He smears the blood left on his hand a little, considering it, and then meets her eyes, and suddenly she knows what he’s planning to do. She sees the way this comes around to meet itself. Sam keeps his eyes on hers. He slides his fingers into his mouth and draws the blood off of them and Brigitte can _taste_ it again — Sam’s. Warm and salt and copper.    
  
And Brigitte… oh fuck, it’s sick, but she digs it. Her breath shakes sharply when she inhales.  
  
There’s still blood left on his fingers when he withdraws them, beneath his fingernails, between his fingers where he was pressed up against her, but he swallows what’s on his tongue and says, dark-eyed and quiet “How ‘bout we’re even, now?” and she has never felt so fucking forgiven.

**SAM**

Brigitte surges forward like a force of nature, kissing him hard and fast and sweet. He kisses her back and she takes another sharp, tight breath against his mouth, and when she pulls away fast he lets her. She hides beneath her hair, beneath her fingers as she cries, and it’s more than just this moment between them. It’s fucking _everything_ all over again — it’s Ginger and the basement and Sam. It’s the house she grew up in being sold and the fear of the cure not working and the threat of wolves in the woods, prowling through subdivisions, it’s getting her period without anyone who truly understands how shit that is. She’s got so much resolve, she holds herself in so fucking tightly, but this time she can’t stop it, and he watches her pull the neck of her t-shirt up over her face and sob into it in these harsh, razor-sharp gasps, and he fucking _hurts_ for her, but it wouldn’t do any good to try to fix it. It’s not fixable, none of this is. Maybe like this she can get it out like a poison. Sam just keeps his arms around her, presses his hand into her narrow back and holds her like he can help keep everything she’s clinging onto from flying apart.

**BRIGITTE**

Five days later — after the cramps and the nausea and the bleeding have finally stopped, she’s sitting on the edge of a planter, a bag of soil at her feet that he’s just brought back from the store. It’s still cool from the air conditioning in the truck (which Sam’s finally fixed), and she presses her hands into it, up past her wrists because she likes the feeling of it. It’s surprisingly light, she thinks, cupping it between her palms. “D’you ever think it’s weird you have to pay money for dirt?” she asks.  
  
“It’s not really dirt,” Sam says, picking dead leaves off a plant just across the aisle. “Dirt’s dead. Soil’s alive, hard to cultivate.”  
  
She squints at him, presses it between her hands. “Arguably, both dead.”  
  
“No, dirt’s like… I dunno, not part of the ecosystem anymore, really. Like, it doesn’t have any life-giving qualities, no nutrients, nothing can grow in it. Soil, though, is like— all these parts of everything else, it’s— minerals and water and air and— I mean there’s dead things in it: humus.”  
  
“ _Posthumous_ ,” she says, softly, like recalling a word from a language from another life.  
  
“Right, exactly. It just means… decaying organic matter — animals, insects, bacteria… microorganisms. Soil actually needs water and air to survive. If it doesn’t get it, then it’s just dirt. Then it can’t grow anything.  
  
He looks up at her, shaking the last of the dead leaves from his fingers onto the floor and she realizes she’s been watching him this whole time. And she thinks that Sam has this way of breathing life into things she thought were just… empty or pointless — husks of something that used to be better. She looks away from Sam, down at her hands because this… this gets to her. That what she’s got between her fingers is alive — death exists in it, it’s there, but only to facilitate growth. Like that’s its whole purpose. And she thinks that she likes that narrative so much better than death as a means to an end: as a shutting down, as a black nothingness.  
  
She’s starting to think that, like everything else, maybe death is just a cycle. Like… like moon phases, like the rotation of the earth around the sun, like menstrual cycles. Everything comes back to some kind of beginning, eventually. Thinking that… it helps.

**SAM**

When she meets his eyes, they both just hold that connection for a second or two, but then she looks away. He realizes, suddenly, that she looks so at home here, now — so unlike the way she did when she first came, in the fall. She’s barefoot, the legs of her pants rolled up to her knees because it’s hot in the greenhouse, and maybe it’s the heat, but he thinks there’s not so much tension in her shoulders.  
  
“Hey, so,” Sam says, and he feels nervous, suddenly, which is maybe stupid. He picks up a pair of shears so he’s got something to do with his hands. “I never took you to that place I told you about.” He checks his watch. It’s only four. “We can go today if you want— or, no, fuck, you’re working.”  
  
Brigitte’s quiet. He watches her lean the whole weight of her upper body over her arms, in the bag of soil almost up to her elbows in it, and he wonders if she’s actually even heard him. He laughs suddenly, anyway. “The fuck are you doing?”  
  
She looks up at him, a quick shake of her head to get her hair out of her eyes. “It feels cold.” She pulls her arms out, soil clinging to them, and brushes it off back into the bag. “I could skip.”  
  
Sam shrugs because he’s just sold a bunch of weed at someone’s house party, and wedding season is in full swing. He’s barely stopped working. They’ve cash enough even without her help. “Yeah, do it.”  
  
She picks soil out from beneath her fingernails and Sam thrusts the shears he was pretending to use into the planter soil. “So you still like it there, right? At the library?” She just shrugs. It’s late nights. It’s hard on her while she’s in school, he remembers. “ ‘Cause I’ve been thinking. If you want to work here, I could… use your help.”  
  
There’s something like hope in her eyes when she looks up, because he knows she likes the greenhouse, but it goes out like a light. “You can’t pay me. That basically defeats the purpose.”  
  
“Suit yourself,” he tells her. “But it would make the workload lighter which means between the two of us, there’s more work done in less time which means more contracts, more pay. Wedding season’s fucking insane this summer, and I swear to god, if one more person asks me for fucking peonies or calla lilies I will lose my fucking mind.”  
  
“I don’t want to talk to _brides_ ,” Brigitte says. “They’re very… intense.”  
  
“Then deal with my imminent insanity,” Sam says, lighting a cigarette. He takes a step towards the outer door because he doesn’t like to smoke around the plants  
  
Brigitte laughs, barely — a quiet breath of a thing as she gets up to follow him out. This is just something they do together. She doesn’t smoke nearly as much as he does, but she nearly always comes out with him. “Did you know that hatters went insane because of the mercurous nitrate they used to cure the felt?” she asks. He holds the door for her and they step out into the cooler breeze of the front yard. “That’s where the Mad Hatter comes from.”  
  
Sam exhales smoke with his eyes on hers and says “Jesus, I like you a lot.”

**BRIGITTE**

He says it so easily, now.  
  
She doesn’t respond, just pushes her hands into her pockets and looks away, out towards the suburbs. She likes that the greenhouse is sort of separate from them. Like a refuge.  
  
“So. Do I get a yes, then?” Sam asks her. She considers the greenhouse door, all those living green things inside — all of which she can name now, most of which she knows the _meaning_ of. The warm, living smell of this place, the peacefulness here. She knows that he actually wants what he’s asking, that he’s not just trying to be nice or trying to get something from her. Sam can say ‘I like you a lot’ and have it mean exactly that. It’s not a lead-in to anything, it’s not a line. He just means it. Sam, she thinks, is easy to read. He doesn’t lie. He wants _her_ to work here even though he doesn’t want anyone else.  
  
“Okay,” she says, and there’s this immediate sensation of relief. Like this is the place she really wants to be. She quits the library that afternoon — considers giving two weeks notice like she’s supposed to, but Sam says “Life’s too short for that shit,” and she kind of has to agree, now.  
  
~*  
  
They get to the place he talked about just before the sun starts setting, golden light in their eyes as they climb out of the van. It’s somewhere way out in rural Ontario, somewhere she’s never been, and she knows, really, that she’s been out of Bailey Downs by now, but it’s not really _out_. Maybe because she keeps going back.  
  
The place is beautiful. There’s really no other way to describe it. There’s a lake, the sun scattering near blinding light off of the waves, and this little copse of trees right at the edge. Wildflowers. Someone’s old wooden property fence is falling into the earth, long-forgotten. And maybe that’s the best part, that there’s no one around. It feels secret here, quiet. She can’t even hear the cars back up on the road. Sam doesn’t wait, he heads right down the embankment from where he’s parked and walks to the edge of the water. The bank is mostly dirt and stones. She follows him, slower, stopping at his side. There’s little minnows in the shallows where the lake meets the shore and she crouches down to watch at them. “How’d you find this place?” she asks after a little while.  
  
“Those drives I used to take in high school,” he tells her. “Sometimes I’d kid myself that I was going to keep driving. Maybe to B.C. or something. Never did… obviously.”  
  
The sun’s lower now, not as blinding. It’s turning into this softly muted sunset — all blue sky and pale yellow clouds. Brigitte stands up again and wonders where _she’d_ be now if he wasn’t here. Maybe he’d be in B.C. and she’d be in a group home. Or maybe she’d have killed herself by now. It seems selfish to say she’s glad he didn’t go, because Sam’s stuck, too. Bailey Downs really is like a well lit black hole: once you’re in, you can’t escape.

**SAM**

Brigitte wanders off to take pictures before the sun sets. She’s got an eye for things that other people don’t notice he thinks, watching her as she frames the way the shadows are hitting the tree trunks along the shoreline. The light changes. He thinks, maybe, they spend a little over an hour there in entirety. He smokes part of a joint more for old time’s sake than anything else but doesn’t leave the roach on the ground. Not here.

**BRIGITTE**

It feels right to have her camera back in her hands for something different, something other than flowers, which has become a kind of project. It feels kind of like she’s found a missing piece of herself, out here. She kind of doesn’t want to go back, but she knows that they have to.  
  
She turns back to find Sam who is crouched at the water’s edge, sifting through stones on the shoreline. He finds one and skips it, somewhat poorly and mutters “Shit.”  
  
Brigitte walks back to him, slow, following the grass as far as she can before it turns to that rocky, sandy shore. He’s searching for another stone flat enough, finds something that looks like shale and skips it again with more success.  
  
It’s a split second decision when she raises the camera again, takes a shot of his profile: eyes down and searching, hair mostly falling forward, tangling into his eyelashes. The shutter goes off and she lowers the camera as he meets her eyes, half-smiling, half-suspicious.  
  
“Are you taking pictures of me?”  
  
“It’s to commemorate your sucky rock skipping skills.”  
  
“Yeah, you think you can do any better?” He holds one out to her. Blueish and white, rounded edges worn smooth by sand. Brigitte can’t skip stones. There was never any water near their house, and she doesn’t want to try now for the first time. She takes it though, and pockets it instead.  
  
He watches her, then stands up. “What do you think, wanna go?”  
  
“Sure.” She says it like _‘no.’_  
  
Sam huffs a laugh, and then just steps close, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. She shifts her weight a little, leaning into his side and wonders when this started to be easy. His jaw brushes against her hairline, like something not quite a kiss and she shuts her eyes, just feels the cool air off the water, hears it lap gently against the shore and lets herself pretend for a minute that maybe they really will just not go back.  
  
But of course, they do. They don’t have anywhere else to go. Separately, they walk back up towards the van. Sam, he finds one more stone, turning to flick it out across the water. It skips seven or eight times before disappearing. Brigitte tsks softly. “Show off.” When Sam laughs it’s not just a rush of breath this time, it’s genuine and bright.  
  
And he directs this smile in her direction and she feels her heart skip when he says “Just trying to impress you, Brigitte F.”  
  
She holds onto the blueish stone all the way home.  
  
~*  
  
July burns into Ontario unusually dry until it feels like there’s this thin layer of dust over everything. She likes working in the greenhouse though. Working, helping, whatever she’s doing. She likes that there’s not this need to fill the silences between them, that hours can slip by and they don’t feel like they have to talk. She gets stronger, because she _doesn’t_ need Sam’s help to lift 25 or 50 pound bags of topsoil, she can figure it out. He tries but she gives him a look and says “I got it,” and he puts his hands up and backs off.  
  
This backfires later, with planters, because they’re too awkward for her to get her arms around. She does try, though, and Sam sort of laughs at her from the doorway and asks if he’s allowed to help her. “Oh fuck off,” she tells him, breathless, too hot. Her hair is getting too long and it's always everywhere, too heavy, too warm. She drags it off the back of her neck with her forearm, fingers catching in tangles, and straightens up.  
  
He helps her with them, doesn’t make her ask, doesn’t just take it himself like she knows he can. He never makes her feel stupid or useless in any of the moments there’s a space for it. Spaces where she’s learned to do it herself in place of others’ words. And lately, here, learning how to do things at the greenhouse, learning how to cope without Ginger, learning how to navigate this strange territory that she’s found herself in with Sam… she’s starting to find that particular space in her head filled less and less with her own negative commentary. It leaves her more room to think. To just be. It lets her breathe a little easier. It’s less heavy to carry around.  
  
The thing with working here, though, is that there’s not really any off-time. The plants can’t be left alone for a weekend. Work intermingles into the rest of their time until she can’t always differentiate. She likes the greenhouses early in the mornings, before Sam’s awake. She likes that she can be alone there, but not really alone, because she’s beginning to understand just how alive everything around her is. Sometimes she thinks she could grasp the idea of the vibrations or energies of plants, or maybe she just wants to because they’re easier than understanding people.  
  
She thinks about cutting her own hair but never does it. Instead, she rakes the tangles into submission in the evenings before she showers and then braids it, wet, down her back and that keeps it out of her way. It’s wild enough that it’s still escaped in frizzing tendrils around her face by morning, and that’s enough to protect her.

**SAM**

They create a kind of routine. He feels less, maybe, like he has to keep watch on her now. This idea that this was temporary, that she was like a guest has faded into the background, melted away with the last of the snow. He doesn’t always get up with her in the mornings, especially on days they’re just going to be kicking around the greenhouse. He thinks she likes it out there in the quiet, with the plants, and he gets that. He leaves her to it most of the time, before he has to go out and work. He showers in the morning and grabs coffee from the coffee maker if she’s left any, and it’s so much less lonely, he thinks, to be by himself when she’s out there, somewhere, and he stops feeling like he should be doing something with himself, with his life, because suddenly it’s like he is. He’s got… something here, and speaking it out loud to her, explaining how to do the general business stuff — customers, orders, but mostly, how to take care of plants, how to recognize what they need (sometimes, dissolving into something more nature-theology or metaphysical, especially if he’s gotten high) he realizes that this is something that he actually loves.  
  
It’s like there’s a purpose to it. Like it means something, this work he’s doing and because so much of the plants and the greenhouse bleed into his life, he starts to feel like maybe he’s not such a waste of space. Like maybe time — time with her, of course, because she’s the thing that started all this, that started to make him feel like maybe he was needed by someone, for something, even something fucking crazy like lycanthropy shit — maybe time he spends alone is worthwhile too. Worth something. And it makes him want to fill it with something other than drinking himself into low-grade numbness just to get _through_ time.  
  
Like maybe now he wants to be _in_ it.  
  
He watches her tear that cheap drugstore brush through her hair one evening and tells her that she looks like someone from one of those traveling carnivals in the 30s. She gives him this look and says “Thanks,” sarcastically, and Sam laughs over the joint he’s rolling. “No I mean— not like freakshow. More like roustie. Roustabout.” She squints at him. “It’s the dust. And the dress.”  
  
“Great,” she says, voice as dry as the air. Normally summers are humid here, but not this one.  
  
 She finds a particularly bad tangle and rips through it hard enough that he winces. To be fair, they’re both shaking dirt out of their hair and their clothes fifty percent of the time these days.  
  
“No, I mean,” He lights the joint and moves to put the binder he was using back. _Shit_ — probably shouldn’t do that on her school stuff. He brushes bits of pot off of it, the exhales the smoke. “It’s pretty. You’re impossible to place in time.”  
  
She looks away, and all that hair falls around her. It’s so long that he can’t even make out the slivers of her face he used to be able to catch. “That’s just ‘cause everyone else looks the same,” she says, coming to sit with him.  
  
Sam snorts, making space for her on the couch. “No,” he says through the smoke in his lungs. He exhales away from her. “I don’t think so. Your face is different. I dunno. Like you could fit into any period in history and be totally believable.”  
  
“Are you gonna start talking to me about past lives or something?” she asks.  
  
“Do you want me to? I could definitely see you in like… 1800s French Canada or some shit.”  
  
She makes this noise of displeasure and then says “ _Je ne suis pas très fort en français_.” She says it completely deadpan, examining her split ends without much feeling.  
  
He barely grasps it. High school French was a long time ago. “Jesus. _Comment dit-on_ ‘show-off’ in French again?”  
  
She smiles, half-wicked, and meets his eyes. Something shifts in the air between them. He thinks about kissing her, now, with her hair hanging just-brushed-soft over her shoulders, and the way her green eyes look dark in any kind of half-light, but she breaks it first and says “Can I try that?”  
  
“This?” he asks. He half holds the joint out to her, not entirely surprised. He was the first time, but that was months ago, and it didn’t work for her. He thinks maybe she didn’t want it to. She takes it from him, and he’s not sure how he feels about it. He doesn’t really know if she wants to, or if she feels like she should, but he’s never said anything one way or the other.  
  
Now, though, as she considers it burning between her fingers. “That’s a gateway drug, you know,” he says, and she scoffs at the joke. When she drags, it’s without any hesitation. She holds it like a cigarette which he finds deeply endearing and probably shouldn’t. She dissolves into a fit of coughing, and Sam says “Take a smaller hit.”

**BRIGITTE**

So… it works this time.  
  
She doesn’t think she likes it. It’s hard to track things, and Sam laughs and says “Brigitte,” more than once, to keep her attention. She doesn’t know when he took the joint back from her or when he turned the TV on. Everything feels very… solid. Very close.  
  
“I think this sucks,” she says at some point and Sam laughs.  
  
“Yeah. You get used to it. Not that you should… you okay?”

**SAM**

“I mean…” she says and stares at the TV for a moment too long. It’s playing Unsolved Mysteries or something, and her eyes are like, black. Sam winces a little just out of her line of vision because she probably took too much. “I just realized that this isn’t still a commercial,” she tells him, with utmost gravity and he cracks up because it’s fucking— it’s crop circles, and that would make for a really messed up commercial.  
  
“No, seriously.” She reaches out and gets a fistful of his shirt at his shoulder, her eyes still on the screen. “I mean, what if UFOs are real? What if— do you believe in ghosts?”  
  
“Wow, that’s…” Sam begins. They both go quiet as the creepy outro music plays and another episode starts up. They try not to think about lycanthropes. “That’s a big question”  
  
 She shakes her head. “That smoke fucked me up.”  
  
“Yeah. You’re okay, though,” he reminds her, because he doesn’t want her to get freaked. “Why’d you want to try it?”  
  
“I think… I wanted to do something different. Just to experience it. But then… you think it’s going to be one way, but then it isn’t _it_ , you know? It’s not what you expected it to be or doesn’t… do what you thought it would… Ginger said that once, and I thought— I thought she just meant…” she gets lost in herself for a moment, and Sam reaches out and nudges her, doesn’t want her going too deep into this now, while she’s stoned.  
  
“Thought what?” he asks, keeping his tone light enough.  
  
“I thought— fuck, what if it’s always like this? You build up all these expectations for things and then it’s never as good as what you imagined. Like ever.” She squints at the TV, then leans over her knees, pressing her hands over her face like the flickering screen and her own thoughts are too much at once. “I don’t know if that makes sense,” she says.  
  
Sam reaches out, shuts the TV off for her, but then it’s just super quiet. He’s got to put music on, just to fill the space. “I think it makes sense,” he says and gets up. “I don’t know if you’re right though.”  
  
He goes through his crate of CDs and finds something sort of background to put on low and ends up with Radiohead's _OK Computer_. From the couch, Brigitte drops her hands into her lap and says, point blank, “Is sex actually as great as everyone acts like it is, or are they all just liars?”  
  
“What?” Sam half-laughs it, because it seems to be related to nothing, but then again, it’s Brigitte Fitzgerald, she’s probably been thinking about it for weeks. Or maybe he's just not tracking the conversation well enough. “Well, it… depends, I think.” Their eyes meet across the room. He feels this swoop in his stomach and drops his eyes back to the CDs without really looking at them. There’s a beat and then he says “Yeah, I bet ghosts are real…”

**BRIGITTE**

She snorts with laughter when Sam throws _that_ diversion up. “You’re gonna change the subject?” she asks, but he’s thrown her a little, because it’s not what she expected. She doesn’t know what she expected. She tries to ground herself, fingers digging into the couch cushions. “Depends on what?”  
  
“Fuck, I dunno,” Sam says, and he’s not looking at her. “How much you like someone, how well you know them, how… fucking hard work was that day… I mean, sometimes, yeah, it’s just fucking mediocre, but—”  
  
“The best part’s wanting it,” Brigitte says, because even if Ginger’s not in her tone, she’s in her memory, always.  
  
Sam finally looks up. He holds her eyes as the music spins itself out into a slow, spiralling _rain down rain down come on rain down on me._ And she thinks that sometimes he looks at her so softly, that he’s so easy to read, that he’s the only place that’s home anymore, that he reminds her that she’s still so fucking alive: when he kisses her, and right now, her heart slamming into her chest. And the weed makes it easy, shakes her loose from all the worn down places inside herself she’s been clinging to. She finally reconciles the whole thing with herself, or at least comes pretty close. She thinks _I do want this_. She thinks _I like you so fucking much._ What ends up tumbling out of her mouth, though is: “Do you want to try, because I would. I mean, I do. So we could, like, if—” She knows the sentence didn’t come out right but he must get it, because he takes this quick breath and looks away from her and she can see the line of tension in his body, the muscle in his jaw as he presses his teeth together. “…If you wanted,” she finishes, very soft.  
  
It takes Sam a second to answer her but when he does, it's all in one breath. “Wait, but Brigitte—”  
  
That’s a no. And it hurts a lot more than she thought it would. She feels like she’s been smacked because fuck, it’s supposed to be easier than this, isn’t it? Guys just do it with whoever, right? So why not her? She scrambles to get herself together before she does something mortifying — before she girls out. For some reason, it helps when she drags her fingers hard through her hair and says “Never mind, forget it.”  
  
“I don’t mean… hey, whoa—”  
  
And suddenly he’s right there. He crouches down in front of her on the couch and gets his hands on hers and gently pulls them down. He takes her face in both hands and kisses her, and maybe it’s ‘cause she’s high, but she can practically taste the anxiety in his mouth — rust, and something hotter. It’s how she feels, too. He pulls away too soon. “I… yeah, I want to. Just not when you’re stoned. Okay? Not the first time. C’mon, Brigitte, look at me.”  
  
She does, and his eyes are dark, honest. Maybe half-afraid. _Not when you’re stoned_. She wants to laugh at that, because being stoned’s the only reason she could even say it. “But I’m brave now,” she tells him, too honest herself, and her voice breaks a little.  
  
“You’re aways fucking brave.” She thinks he might kiss her again, he’s looking at her like he might, but in the end he doesn’t, just takes his place beside her instead. “Let’s just…” he begins, “Let’s do this right, okay? I want to do this right.”  
  
She fidgets, toying with her rings. “What is this, anyway?” she asks, barely above a whisper.  
  
Sam’s quiet for a second, then looks at her, sidelong. “What do you want it to be?”  
  
But she doesn’t have an answer to that. She doesn’t think he does, either.


	10. Chapter 10

**SAM**

It’s hard not to feel like he’s fucked up when she’s sitting there so still and silent beside him. And he doesn’t know what to say, either, except bring up the thing that’s played over and over in his head since the night she said it. The thing that sometimes makes him question what he’s doing here, with her.  
  
“You told me once,” he says, pressing his hands together, leaning over his knees. “That you’d rather be my friend than anything else.” He looks back over his shoulder at her.  
  
“You told me once that you didn’t think of me that way,” she responds, too quick for how dilated her pupils are. Her meaning’s clear _People change their minds. People say stupid shit._ She takes a long breath through her nose. “Honestly, it seems pretty stupid that people are willing to risk something good for something that’s just mediocre.”  
  
“It’s not always mediocre,” Sam says, soft. He shouldn’t have said anything, shouldn’t have started this when they’re both high. Jesus, is this the view of the world he’s going to give her? Sex is mediocre, and then you die?  
  
“So, what?” Brigitte asks, voice too careful, too soft to be cutting. “You fuck somebody and you can’t be friends anymore?”  
  
Sam presses his teeth together and kind of shakes his head. “That’s not it.”  
  
“Then what?”  
  
He shuts his eyes. “Because, it’s…” How does he possibly explain this? “It changes things. The whole… dynamic shifts.” The music track picks up, goes fuzzy. _You can laugh / A spineless laugh / We hope your / Rules and wisdom choke you._  
  
It feels like the inside of his head. It feels exactly like that. He wishes he’d chosen a different album. She’s listening to it, too. She’s got her eyes on his face when he looks back at her. She looks so intense.  
  
“C’mon, Brigitte,” he pleads, “Let’s not do this now.”  
  
And he expects her to be pissed, he doesn’t know why, but she softens as she considers him. Finally, she looks away, leaning back against the corner of the couch, pulling one knee up against her chest. And he wonders if he’s fucked up, because she might not ask again. Because she might change her mind. But then… then it wouldn’t be fucking up, would it? If she only asked because she was high.  
  
There’d be no going back from that. No, he thinks, exhaling tension. This was the right decision. Except.  
  
“One other problem?” Brigitte says, voice low enough to rasp softly.  
  
He looks at her, wondering if his heart rate’s ever going to settle tonight.  
  
“I’m starving.”  
  
“Jesus,” he breathes, all that anxiety escaping.  
  
They laugh too hard at that. It breaks the moment, shatters it, because they need to. They need to move away from it. And they go out, they brave the night and all the monsters it might hold, and walk to the only fluorescent-lit greasy spoon in this god-forsaken place that sells anything this late at night.  
  
They decide to cross the field because it’s the fastest way, but it’s dark. The wind whispers through the grass all around them like anything, anything could be there. Sam wishes they could reverse this decision, but they’re already well off the road. “Wanna run?” he asks, praying that she does, because quick and painless, right? Get it over with. He sorta doesn’t want to die for shawarma.  
  
Without answering, she runs, and he follows in a heartbeat. And god, it’s freeing, somehow. It shakes out the terror he didn’t even know he was holding onto. Her legs flash pale in the dark and they’re racing full out across the field, like wild things. He feels alive until his lungs remind him he’s a smoker. She stops when she realizes she’s lost him, she comes back.  
  
Sam coughs roughly a couple times, hands on his knees, and then straightens, and it’s just both of them, gasping, hearts slamming into their ribs. Brigitte sort of drifts away, to what might be the exact centre of it all, still breathing fast, turning on the spot, her eyes scanning the margins. He tells himself he would be less freaked if he wasn’t high, but she’s got this power thrumming through her with her blood. She’s facing down the darkness _because_ it scares her. He thinks he’s never seen anything so goddamn beautiful.  
  
When he takes her hand, she lets him — dark-eyed, breathless creature. They walk the rest of the way, untouched even if they’re not safe.  
  
Maybe safe only exists in the greenhouse. Or maybe it’s in each other. They cross the train tracks and then they are in civilization again, fluorescent-lit windows like a lodestar in the distance, promising drunk food, and sustenance for the stoned.

**BRIGITTE**

Morning.  
  
Last night, they’d gotten back to the greenhouse and collapsed, exhausted and fully clothed onto the bed, sleep washing over them like the tide. Now, though, with sunlight filtering in through the windows, what she said last night slides, unprompted, into her brain, and she discovers that it’s sort of hard to be mortified about a conversation when that person is sleeping curled into you, his face against the side of your throat.  
  
Still, though, she wishes she’d said it better. She wishes, maybe, that she hadn’t said anything, but she had to be sure. She isn’t like Ginger, who probably would have just went for it. Brigitte always has to know, plan, prepare.  
  
Sam’s arm rests heavily across her hips. She’s on her back, so she has most of the bed, and she didn’t tie her hair up, so it’s sort of tangled and caught beneath both of them. She kind of doesn’t mind being trapped here, and wonders what it means that they both don’t know what to call this. She knows all the words, all the things they _might_ be, but none of them feel right.  
  
She dozes a little, lulled by his breathing, by his warmth. He hums against her skin as he starts to wake up and she rolls onto her side and into him. His fingers immediately find her hair, combing over tangles. They don’t normally touch like this in the mornings, but somehow it’s easier, still fully clothed from last night and on top of the covers. He drags this open-mouthed kiss over her collarbone then makes his way up over her throat, and she makes a startled sound. It’s like an electric shock, crackling between her thighs, spreading out warm and slow as he drags the edge of his teeth against her jaw.  
  
“Fuck,” she breathes, and he pulls her head back gently by a fistful of her hair.  
  
“Brigitte,” Sam says, hushed, lips against hers. The kiss pushes her onto her back and he moves over her. He’s got her hair at the back of her neck, and one of his legs between hers when he pulls back to meet her eyes. He’s checking in. _Too much?_ But it isn’t. She gets her fingers in his shirt over his sternum and pulls him back down to her. There’s no caution this time. He kisses her deep, searching, kind of moans softly into her mouth, and she doesn’t really have anywhere to go because he’s still holding her hair, keeping her head tipped back just a little too far.  
  
He breaks the kiss just to lap at her mouth and she clenches her thighs because that jolts her to her core. It feels, for a split second, like that hot, melting dream she had — kissing Ginger. She hears herself make this sound and Sam presses his forehead to hers and releases her hair to touch her face. His thumb grazes her lower lip, and he says, low “Put your hands in my hair,” so she does. She slides her fingers up the back of his neck and digs her fingers into it, getting these mean fistfuls, and Sam’s hips rock down against her thigh sharply. Involuntary. “Ohchrist,” he breathes.

**SAM**

Sam’s hand rakes down over the front of her dress, catching at the birdskull necklace, sending it rolling across her shoulder and down onto the mattress. He follows the hard line of her body until he can tug the hem of her dress up around her hips, then he kisses her again.  
  
Her fingers find the buttons of his shirt and she undoes them with surprising speed and Sam wants to tell himself he didn’t even mean for it to go this far, but he thinks he’s been dreaming about her low voice from last night _… so we could, if you wanted…_  
  
Of course he fucking wants to. But— oh _shit_. “Brigitte—”  
  
She pushes his shirt down over his shoulders and he shrugs out of it, reaching for her as soon as he’s discarded it behind him, lets his palms run up the insides of her bare thighs and over the fabric of her underwear where, oh fuck, she’s wet where he brushes against her.  
  
So he’s pretty much fucking done for.  
  
She reaches for the button of his jeans and— _fuck, what was he just thinking? Oh, right…_  
  
“Shit, wait—” he pulls back. Jesus, he’s going to die, she’s going to kill him. She fixes him with this desperately perplexed, half-outraged look that says she feels the same way and jesus, he gets it, he fucking gets it; they’re always stopping. “I don’t have anything,” he tells her, “Just—”  
  
They’ve got to slow down. He can’t bring himself to say it, though, because she’s looking at him intense, looking _very_ fucking kissed. Jesus Christ.  
  
Brigitte sort of collapses back into the pillow with this dramatic, loose-limbed frustration, hands falling from his shoulders to the pillow beside her. She grits out this ‘ughh’ from the very centre of her chest. Sam’s still trying to catch his breath. Reality’s starting to filter in again, but it doesn’t change the fact that he’s so goddamn hard it hurts. “Sorry, I’m sorry,” he says. He pulls back, drops onto the mattress beside her and drags his fingers over his cheekbone. “Fuck...”

**BRIGITTE**

“Here,” Sam says, he touches her hip. “At least— let me… I can do anything you want.”  
  
_Let me._  
  
She digs her hands into her eye socks. “You know what I want,” she says to the ceiling. She knows it’s not fair to be pissed — she’s _not_ , but she’s furious anyway with the way things are, frustrated. She can feel him shaking where his arm is against hers.  
  
“I know, but— look, it’s probably better that we don’t go there right now. I— here… c’mere.”  
  
“Why?” she asks. She doesn’t ‘c’mere.’  She rolls onto her side to face him instead, getting a few inches of distance between them, pushing her dress back down over her hips. “Why’s it better if we don’t?” He doesn’t answer, so she continues. “Is it ‘cause you don’t think we could deal? You think _we_ can’t? After everything that we’ve been through, you’re not willing to risk it?”  
  
“I never said that,” Sam says, softly.  
  
“Then _why_? When I said I would—”  
  
He exhales through his teeth, then says “I just told you—”  
  
“Well it feels like excuses—”  
  
“No,” he says, half over her, “Because you can’t go _back_ , Brigitte.”  
  
She takes that in. Really takes it “I’m so fucking sick of going back,” she says, sitting up, pulling herself in close, cross-legged. She presses her spine against the wall. “I don’t want to go back anymore”  
  
“Yeah, and I don’t want to be the reason you might. You’re fift—”  
  
She rolls her eyes so hard he stops. “I know that. And in two months I’ll be sixteen. And then I’ll be seventeen, and then eighteen, _finally_ , the magical age bracket where I’m suddenly _fuckable_.” She says it with such spite, practically spits it out.  
  
“That’s not—”  
  
“Then _what?_ Don’t you get it? That waiting’s worse? I’m going to turn eighteen, and then it’s _open season_ on me? On _all_ girls? That’s worse, Sam, can’t you see that that’s _fucking worse_? It’s insane, who fucking _decided_ that?”  
  
“Well, fuck, don’t fucking get mad at me—”  
  
“Look.” She takes this shaking breath. “It’s me. You _know_ me. And I’ve already made the biggest decision of my life, so if I’m fucked up? It won’t be because of you, so you don’t have to worry about that.”

**SAM**

God that’s cutting. Sam exhales and sits up, doing the button of his jeans up again as he reaches to the bench at the end of the bed for his smokes. The blue rock he (inadvertently) gave to her is sitting there alongside her camera, the pillar candle. It softens him. It gets his thoughts in order. “Okay, but you,” he begins carefully, shifting to face her better as he opens the pack “just barely have a handle on this by yourself. You don’t even— jesus, Brigitte. You want me to have sex with you when I can _barely_ touch you? When _you_ can’t even touch yourself?”  
  
She winces a little beneath that, looks away. “It’s like it’s too intense…” she says, puzzling it out, out loud. “Like it’s just nothing or it’s too intense. But when it was you— whenever it’s you, it’s… like. Safe.”  
  
And fuck, that gets him to hear her say that. That he’s safe. “That’s exactly how I feel about you.” he tells her. “But then, you’re the one that told me I didn’t have a great track record. So why’re you so eager to jump in line?” It’s a shitty thing to say about himself. He knows it, and she does too, because she gives him this look that’s total disappointment, and something close to disgust, because he shouldn’t have said it to _her_ , either.  
  
“Did you feel safe with them?” Brigitte asks, her voice hard. “Those girls?”  
  
He looks at her for a long moment. Finally, he huffs this almost-laugh, shaking his head incredulously because she’s smart. She’s got him totally figured out.  “…No.” he finally says, “I didn’t.”  
  
Brigitte holds out her hand for the cigarette, more demanding than asking. He hands it over and she takes a quick drag, her eyes down. “I want to ‘cause I like you,” she says, and maybe she sounds too practical for the sentiment, for how _much_ she likes him, but she can finally get it out when she feels self-possessed and not overwhelmed, and that’s important to her in this moment. “And ‘cause you’re not a fuckup, even if you think you are. I think I’ve stuck around long enough to know that. So…” She meets his gaze. “We can be whatever you want, but… not if you keep thinking you’re the one who fucks things up.”  
  
“Then you can’t, either,” Sam says, very quietly. It’s taken him a moment to sound steadier than he feels.  
  
Brigitte leans over and butts out the smoke in the ashtray. “Fine,” she says. “Also, you smoke too much.”  
  
Sam folds his fingers in front of his mouth, considering her as she sits back against the wall again. He takes a breath then tells her “You’re really incredible, you know that?”  
  
She rolls her eyes like _whatever_ , and doesn’t really look at him.  
  
“No,” Sam says, almost laughing. “You don’t get to lecture me, then _weasel_ out of it. You are.”  
  
She looks up and searches his face. He holds her eyes because fuck, he wants her to believe it but she doesn’t even act belief very well. She looks away before she says “Thanks… I guess.”  
  
~*  
  
Sam takes her out, later. Thinking like maybe they both need to get out of there, that small space, because he keeps looking at her and half-wondering how he can get his hands into the soft tangles of her hair again, and then he just spirals from there.  
  
He takes her to this vast parking lot of what used to be a Zellers and then just… wasn’t anything. “Okay, get out,” he says, and she looks at him like maybe he’s going to abandon her there in some vacant lot in the sticks. He pushes open his own door and hops out. “C’mon,” he says beckoning her to his side, “C’mere.”  
  
She comes around all suspicion, and he holds the door for her. “What.” she asks.  
  
“I’m gonna teach you how to drive. Get in.” She does, and he guides her through adjusting the mirrors, the seat. The seat sticks so he has to reach past her legs to yank the handle up to push it forward. His forearm brushes her shin and it’s _stupid_ how much that gets to him. He drags his mind out of that dangerous area as he steps back. Even way forward she’s almost too small for the van. She looks terrified. “Seatbelt,” he reminds her, because she’s just sitting there gripping the wheel like the thing’s going to start moving on its own. He comes round to the passenger side, getting in beside her and pushing his sunglass up into his hair. “Okay,” he says, and walks her through it. She actually gets the hang of it all pretty fast. She’s tense, but she remembers what he tells her, except for one instance where panics and hits the brake too hard. He laughs at her, and they quit pretty soon after that.

**BRIGITTE**

“No, you did good,” Sam tells her after they switch back and he drives them roughly in the direction of home. “You’re shit at backing up though.”  
  
“Well, it’s hard to see,” she says defensively. “Why’re you showing me this anyway?”  
  
Sam hesitates, then says “Just in case you decide you’ve gotta be somewhere .”  
  
“Where would I go?”  
  
“You could go anywhere,” Sam says. “Anyway, you’re almost sixteen, right? We can practice like this until you write your test, and then…” He doesn’t finish. “I figured… you wouldn’t want to sit through drivers ed, so…”  
  
He’s not wrong. But it sits strangely with her. She doesn’t push it.  
  
_Out by sixteen or…_  
  
Or what?  
  
_What now, Bee?_  
  
~*  
  
She gets her period again near the end of July. It almost surprises her that it shows up again — like she thought maybe it was a one-off. It comes with cramps and a wicked headache and then fades as quiet as the tide. It makes her think about how long summers are. How long they _used_ to feel, counting down the days until school started again with slowly growing dread. Now the months seem even shorter than ever, divided starkly by her bleeding and the phases of the moon — something else she pays attention to, now, that she never noticed before.  
  
This evening finds her lying on the floor of Sam’s room because it’s cooler than the couch or the bed and Sam's got the heater but no air conditioner, so she lying directly in the path of the floor fan. To her right, Sam’s sitting at the table weighing weed because there’s a bush party tomorrow night and he plans on selling a bunch.  
  
“You wanna come?” he asks her.  
  
“ _No_ ,” she says, like he’s just asked her if she wanted to go slaughter pigs for fun. He laughs softly.  
  
The truth is, she kind of doesn’t want Sam to go either. All those people, the bonfires, the woods. Anything could be out there, and they’re, like, begging for its attention. She hasn’t said anything, but they’re both thinking it.

**SAM**

The day of the party, she’s been increasingly anxious all day. She doesn’t eat much. “I promise I’ll be careful,” he tells her. “Anyway, there’s been no… dead dogs, no one’s missing.”  
  
“I know, I just… it’s the woods, it’s not just the suburbs.”  
  
Sam bites his lip and looks over at all the weed he’s bagged. There’s a thousand dollars to be made there at least. If the turnout’s good, maybe more. It’s easier to sell in the middle of nowhere than in a school parking lot. But…  
  
“I don’t have to go,” he says, looking back at her, and he means it.  
  
She takes this breath that means she doesn’t want to make the decision. She exhales resignation. “Okay. I’m going with you.”  
  
Before they set out for the party, he watches her drag the sports bag out from under his bed and dig an eyeliner pencil from somewhere in the depths of it. She keeps her winter clothes in there, now that summer’s come. The bag makes her presence here seem sort of… impermanent. Like she’s not staying. But then, there’s no real room here for all of her stuff, so she has to keep some of it in that bag. He tries to remind himself that the rest of her things are intermingled with his things. Her clothes and his, organized roughly by darks and lights in the closet, her hairbrush on the bathroom counter, her school things, her photographs everywhere…  
  
She disappears into the bathroom and re-emerges dressed all in black. Black leggings and leather boots and whatever else she’s wearing swallowed by an enormous, black hoodie. Her hair’s pulled loose from the braid and raked down around her face. She’s lined her eyes with all this black liner and he realizes that all of it — the makeup, the oversized clothes — it’s protection. She’s designed herself to fade into the shadows. She looks unapologetically weird and it makes her unapproachable with this sort of vehemence: Everything about her says _don’t fucking talk to me_ and Sam considers, again, whether this is a good idea. Like there’s wolves out there that don’t run on four legs. That don’t have canine teeth. And she’s afraid of them, but she goes anyway, for him, to make sure he’s safe from real monsters. He’s about to tell her they don’t have to go again, but she’s ready. She leads the way out to the van. He wants to protect her from all of it, but she probably doesn’t really need his protection.  
  
The drive is long — an hour or so on the old backroads. He holds her hand the whole time but they don’t talk much  
  
“Hey, so,” he says, when the light from the bonfire becomes visible through the trees. He slows to find parking amongst all the darkened cars along the side of the road. “What are we to these people? Are you sticking with me, or?”  
  
“They won’t buy anything from you if you’re with me,” she says, matter of fact.  
  
Sam parks, turns the van off. “Yeah they will.”  
  
She shakes her head, disagreeing. “I’ll be close by.”  
  
“Hey,” Sam says and she looks at him, and he wants to kiss her, but she’s holding herself so tightly, it’s like the old days. “We’ll be careful.”  
  
She nods.  
  
~*  
  
It’s so easy selling to drunk folks, except for the conversation. Sam’s pretty much resigned to it though, at parties like these. Brigitte gives him this look when he pulls out the bottle of rye and, honestly, he gets it. Not a great plan to be drinking if there’s lycanthropes in the woods. “I’m not getting drunk,” he tells her as they get out of the van. There’s barely a third left in the bottle anyway, and it was only a pint. “It’s just… part of the show, you know? It’s business.”  
  
She scowls at him, at the bottle, but gives in. Anyway, she’s got her own arsenal of necessities. He’d watched her slip a small wooden box of her things into the front pocket of her hoodie before they left the greenhouse, but didn’t ask.  
  
She pulls her hood up over her head, even more hidden than before, and they walk side by side towards the light through the trees, abandoning the road for wild ground.

**BRIGITTE**

People know Sam, people she doesn’t recognize. They don’t see her, and she leaves his side as soon as they step into the light. She feels him reach for her, but she’s already gone.  
  
Someone’s brought a boombox, and the music sounds wrong and uncanny out here in the woods somehow. There’s all this heavy bass, but the trees swallow it until it’s dulled, muted, and she feels like she’s underwater. She skirts the edges of the party, always keeps Sam in her peripheral. She doesn’t like that she can’t hear anything out there in the darkness.  
  
She squeezes the edge of the wooden box. Inside it, amongst other odds and ends, she’s got Sam’s harvesting knife, monkshood tincture in one of those little amber bottles. She’d made Sam show her how to make it that way — not just heating the buds, but actually prepared and bottled to keep. There’s two syringes rolling around in there. There’s a picture of her and Ginger, one of the ones that used to be up on the walls of their bedroom, taped it to the inside of the lid. And…  
  
Just recently, at the greenhouse, they’d been working outside. She forgets what she was saying to him, only that he hadn’t responded, and that that felt strange. So she’d come round the open back of the van just in time to meet Sam as he ducked out from the cool darkness inside of it and hopped down into the heat and sunlight with her. He'd looked up at her like he didn’t know what to say, something cupped in his hands like a living thing.  
  
She reached without thinking, and he placed it into her palms. And there was Ginger’s bird skull necklace. He’d found it in the back corner of the van, rolled behind tools and burlap and unswept plant cuttings and pine needles, all this time. The string is broken. She'd just held it and Sam said nothing.  
  
When, without a word, she turned to go back inside he didn't follow her.  
  
She thought about burying it, but couldn’t bring herself to part with it. Where would she even do it? In the woods, where the attack happened? She can’t, so she’s kept it in the box with the rest of these things. These tools for survival.

**SAM**

Sam sells to people too drunk or stoned to notice that he’s constantly looking over shoulders, scanning the crowd for that small figure in black. He smokes some pot because it’s all just part of the game: sell some, smoke some, act like a friend. Keeps people coming back.  
  
He used to pull this way. Girls know that. Drunk girls with short, short dresses and glassy eyes who smell like salt and vanilla. Sam knows what perfume tastes like on skin, he remembers it from the smell of their hair as they lean into him.  
  
“Shotgun?” Loose, dark curls, freckled face, big brown eyes. Pretty girl, and he knows her from somewhere. She’s got on this summer dress, soft shoulders, freckles all down her chest where the firelight catches on her, delicate gold necklace resting against the swell of her breasts.  
  
“That’s okay,” he says, looking away. He’s barely even gotten started selling and he feels so done. And _where’s Brigitte?_

**BRIGITTE**

She circles the party, half-shadowed. No one stops her if she’s moving, no one looks. She’s just someone else going somewhere. She’s good at being invisible. There’s people she knows here, but mostly people she doesn’t. She spots some of the Trina clones. They’ve established a new hierarchy, it seems, and she puts as much space between them and herself as she can. She finds Sam, finds Sam, finds Sam. He moves through the crowd with this system. Touches guys like he knows them, joint burning between his fingers like a reminder of what he’s selling. He smokes enough to keep it burning. The rye in the bottle gleams amber. He talks easily with them about things she can’t hear. They always buy something. They think they’re pals. It’s weird, she thinks. It’s so weird, because she can see that it’s all just mechanics. Over and over, Sam finds her, catches her eyes, checks in. She wants to be near him, but she doesn’t want that hot, loud press of people all around her.  
  
Part of her wants to disappear into the forest at her back because it’s cool and quiet. She feels caught here, at the fringes.  
  
Someone throws a bottle of beer into the fire and it explodes. People scream, and Brigitte’s heart-rate rockets up into the stratosphere, but it’s just… it’s nothing. Nothing terrible is happening. But she loses Sam in the crowd.  
  
Someone touches her shoulder and she spins, because the touch is wrong. “Jesus Christ, _Fitz_!”  
  
It’s Ben. She twitches, pulls back.  
  
“Holy shit,” he says, like he’s seen a ghost.  
  
“What.”  
  
“We thought you were like dead, man.” He’s really drunk, Brigitte can smell the liquor. She takes another step back. Ben, tall, blonde, idiotic but probably only like that because of his crowd — he’s not the worst of them, not by a long shot, but it doesn’t mean she trusts him. She doesn’t even really understand why he’s talking to her. “Saw that the _police_ were at your house, it was on the actual _news_! And then— yeah this social worker came to the school and like. I mean, we all saw you talking to Sam at school, so Tim said maybe you went there. Holy fuck, man.” He takes a long drink of something that smells sweet. Brigitte looks back out to the rest of the party.  
  
“When you didn’t show up back to school we thought like… you were dead for sure.”  
  
Brigitte really doesn’t know what to say to this. Ben caps his drink again and looks up at her. “You know he’s a drug dealer, right? You’re gonna get messed up with that shit.”  
  
“What do you want?” she asks, more perplexed than rude.  
  
“I felt bad. Like when you— I thought you were dead, I felt bad. Like… maybe shouldn’t’ve said all that shit to you at field hockey…”  
  
This is so far removed from Brigitte’s world, now. Lewd comments in gym class? She’s dealt with so much worse than that. She thinks about what Sam said about high school being barely a blip on the radar and she looks up at Ben who looks, to his credit, genuinely apologetic, and thinks that he is so, so untouched by the world. He’s so insulated. She thinks maybe she kind of gets it now, even though she’s still fucking _in it._  
  
“Ben,” she says, because she doesn’t have to forgive him. “Go find your friends.”  
  
“I came here with them,” Ben says, in that conspiratorial way of the very wasted. Too loud by half and too close. She steps back again, but she’s crossed the boarder between party and woods and she doesn’t want to get too far from the light, or Sam.  
  
With her cornered, and Ben oblivious, like most guys are, to her desire to not be having this interaction at all, Ben says “It’s like they’re just so… like stunned or something sometimes. You know, like I feel like I can’t be myself?” This is turning into a therapy session fast. Brigitte squirms, squeezing the box in the pocket of her sweater. “I mean so… I kissed this guy at the beginning of summer,” Ben says. “And I fucking _liked_ it. And I can’t tell anybody, you know? I mean, he went back to the states or wherever, I’ll probably never see him again, but shit. I mean… I guess I kept thinking about how I said that shit to you, even though I might not even like girls… it’s fucking weird, right? Like it’s fucking _weird_ , isn’t it?”  
  
“Yeah, weird,” Brigitte says, monotone. She’s not even looking at him, scanning the crowd, but Sam’s just… not there.  
  
“Like, you’d definitely— you’re into chicks, right? You’re freaky like that. So I just wanted to know," he slurs, "what you think. I mean... don’t want to _fuck_ a guy, so I think _I’m_ gay. No, wait. I mean _not_ gay. I think I’m not gay. You know? It was just kissing. I mean, it’s two thousand fucking one, we should—”  
  
“Heyy,” Sam says, half a greeting, but drawing the word out like he’s not sure exactly what he’s interrupting. Brigitte floods with relief, and when Ben turns to face him, she catches Sam’s eyes for a second, and he gets a read on the situation. _‘Help’_ Brigitte mouths behind Ben’s back and Sam smiles at her, but directs it to Ben and says. “Hey, man, it’s been a while. Listen, I’m just about sold out here,” (eyes flicker to Brigitte's — _let’s blow_ ), “you buyin’?”  
  
As Ben tries to figure out his wallet (it looks complicated, and he’s swaying a little) Brigitte steps back towards the light. The exchange takes longer than it should — Ben’s having a rough time, but it seems to make him forget all about her because when Sam pushes him gently by the shoulder towards the party and away from the darkness at their backs, he doesn’t even look for her, just stumbles over to his friends.  
  
Sam catches her eyes and nods towards the road and they skirt the party separately. Sam gets tangled into another conversation or two but makes his excuses, hands off the last of the joint he’s smoking to someone, and she climbs the embankment to the highway without him, leaning against the guard-rail to wait. She doesn’t move until he reaches her side, and then they climb it together and walk back to the van.  
  
“How much did you drink?” she asks. He shows her the bottle because he’s had a mouthful at most. That’s good enough for her. “Did you use to drive home?”  
  
“Could usually sleep it off in the back,” he says, starting the van once they’re safely inside. The dashboard clock says it’s three in the morning.  
  
“Made like fifteen hundred,” Sam says, and grins at her. “What did your friend want?”  
  
“What did _yours_?” Brigitte shoots back. “Ben was having a gay crisis, maybe you should talk to him, if you’re turning down girls like that.” She says it to her fingernails as she searches for hangnails. Sam looks at her for a long moment, half-smiling.  
  
“I’ve got a good reason for turning down girls like that,” he tells her, then pulls out onto the road, pulling the car around sharply so they can go back the way they came.  
  
“What’s the reason?”  
  
Sam’s quiet for a moment, glancing at the gas light, turning the radio on low. He seems to be rolling it around somewhere in his throat, just on the cusp of words and Brigitte’s lungs decide to kind of stop working.

**SAM**

He’s got the words. They’re right there. They come to him without even thinking because they're what this is: this quiet affection that’s spread and tangled through every facet of him, curled around his ribs like vines, dropped the words into his throat like honey — he’s in love with her. He's known for a while, now. But he doesn’t think it’s right to tell her tonight, because he doesn’t know if anyone’s ever told her that before, and he doesn't want it to be like the first time he kissed her.  
  
“The reason?” he says instead, stalling for time. “Is that I’d rather be doing _anything_ with you over doing whatever she was offering.”  
  
Brigitte’s quiet, considering that, and then she says “Hey… how far’s that place from here, the one you took me to?”  
  
“Maybe an hour. But it’s back that way.”  
  
“Would you go there with me now?”  
  
Of course, he turns the van around. And she’s so quiet, and Sam starts to get an inkling as to what this is about. There’s a sign for an exit up ahead and he takes a deep breath. “Hey. What’re we doing, here?”  
  
"We're done waiting, aren't we?" Brigitte asks, but it's not really a question anymore.  
  
He holds her eyes as long as he can before he has to look back at the road. “...Okay,” he says softly. He takes the exit. At the gas station, she comes in with him and disappears into the bathrooms while he buys gas, cigarettes, condoms. His hands shake as he digs out some of the cash from tonight to pay for it. He buys a cup of coffee, too and then waits for her in the van where dawn’s just beginning to lighten the sky. Brigitte re-emerges with the eyeliner scrubbed off, smelling vaguely of the soap of every gas station he’s ever been to in his life.

**BRIGITTE**

The plastic bag he’s tossed onto the van’s floor is pretty much a giveaway because he doesn’t need it for just cigarettes. She fastens her seatbelt, takes the coffee when he hands it to her, and they pass it back and forth as he drives. When it’s his turn, she leans forward, twists her shoulder beneath the dash to reach the bag and pulls the condoms out, holding the pack in her lap. The sky’s just light enough to see by now and she studies it with the same mild uncertainty as she did the feminine hygiene section at the drug store.  
  
“Triple tested,” she reads, impassively, picking at the plastic wrap around the box, crumpling it up into her hand, and then, in that same deadpan: “Hope they washed it.”  
  
“Je-sus _Christ_ ,” Sam says, but he’s already breaking into laughter and she grins, beneath her hair. “That’s horrific.”  
  
She lets herself laugh, then, quietly, and the tension breaks between them.

**SAM**

The sky’s turning soft grey over the water when they get there. Like always, there’s not a soul around. The grass is wet with dew and soaks through his shoes in seconds. He stands at the edge of the water like he always does — this ritual he has with the place, but he doesn’t smoke anything yet. She’s slower, taking her time as she finishes the coffee sort of on her own behind him, wandering where the beach is rockiest. He wonders if she’s having second thoughts, but when he looks at her, she’s not holding any of that tell-tale tension in her shoulders.  
  
She finally comes to stand beside him. She gets her cold fingers between his and he thinks that she’s never taken his hand before, it’s always the other way around. “You still want to, right?” she asks.  
  
“Yeah. Do you?”  
  
She nods.  
  
There’s a wool blanket in the back of the van for if he ever breaks down again in the winter. He tells her that story as he digs it out — how he broke down somewhere near Etobicoke on one of his high school drives in minus 40 with the wind chill. How it took them hours to get a tow truck to him. He spreads it out over the grass, sheltered by the trees and the water. Somewhere way out a loon makes its haunting call and another one answers it, further away. He sits down on the blanket and looks up at her. She’s staring out across the water, but the horizon is swallowed in the mist rising from the lake.  
  
“Do you ever just never want to go back to society?” Brigitte asks.  
  
“All the time,” he responds.

**BRIGITTE**

The mist cuts them off even more from the rest of the world — she can barely make out the dilapidated wooden fence, and she thinks about how safe it feels here, compared to the woods and wonders why that is. She feels almost like a ghost here, shrouded in soft light, until she looks back at Sam and it’s that candlelight feeling inside her all over again.  
  
They’ve been here before, her and Sam — uncovered, wanting... But even now at the edge of this thing — losing her virginity: it’s different from what she thought it would be. It’s not... Ginger and Jason making out on the school field. There’s no displaced aggressive passion. It’s such a relief, she thinks, and she likes the quiet sounds of them undressing themselves in the softness of the morning. She undoes her boots and takes them off so that she can shed her leggings. Her hoodie follows, and the dawn air is cold on her skin as she shrugs out of it. She gets goosebumps on her arms and legs.  
  
She turns in time to see Sam — shirtless, scarred — undo his jeans and push them down and off along with his shoes and shirt. He looks back at her, eyes flickering over her face, her bare legs. He tugs the sleeve of her t-shirt, almost a dress on her. “That mine?”  
  
“Mm,”  
  
And then he kisses her.  
  
He kisses her and strokes her through the fabric of her underwear stopping and starting again and again so she doesn’t get overwhelmed with the touch. He’s still trying to figure this out, how to make it good for her and she wishes she could help him.  
  
“Keep going?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
So he pulls her shirt off, draws her underwear down her legs, then takes off his own. She feels like it’s sort of disappointing that he has to put the condom on — like why take off everything just to replace it with more separation?  
  
It doesn’t scare her anymore, how long she’s been waiting for this. He’s got his mouth on her neck, on her breasts. His hands follow, not like the groping grasping boys she’s seen in school, in movies. But she knows that — she knows how Sam touches her. He cups her in his palm and exhales roughly against her skin like it does something to him, and she _likes_ that. She likes to hear his breath shake.  
  
Everything’s slow. He wets his fingers, then slips them between her legs, pushes them inside her like the first time, when she got her period, only it’s different now. It’s totally fucking different. He moves so slowly that she thinks she’s going to die because it’s not enough to break that ache inside her and, because of that, the sensation sort of overwhelms her until she has to stop him.  
  
“Just do it, I think,” she says. “It’s too much like this.”  
  
“Fuck,” Sam breathes. “Really?”  
  
“ _Yes_ ,” she says. She says it like _stop asking me._ They both already know the answer by now.

**SAM**

“Jesus, Brigitte…” He exhales a breath because she’s really not wet, and he doesn’t want to hurt her. “This is really gonna suck for you, I think.”  
  
“Well it’s not my fault my body doesn’t cooperate,” she says, frustrated, and he sighs, his eyes on hers, considering.  
  
“Let’s just… will you let me go down on you?” he asks. Might as well be a whole day of firsts, right? She pulls this skeptical face like she can’t possibly see how that would be enjoyable for anyone. He kisses her. “C’mon, trust me,” he says and he feels her relax a little. “Yeah?”  
  
“Okay.”  
  
So he does, and _that_ gets some noises out of her that he likes. He’s gentle — he doesn’t want to get her off this way, not right now, but he thinks it’ll help ease the pain of the rest of it. The next time he slides his fingers inside her, his tongue pressed hard against her clit, it’s easy. “There you go,” he says against the inside of her thigh, then moves up again. She’s all hands now. On his shoulders on his face. He kisses her cautiously, but she doesn’t seem to mind it, so he just settles over her for a moment, hips together, and she closes her fingers in his hair.

**BRIGITTE**

They have to go slowly all over again when he finally reaches down to guide himself inside her. It’s not bad at first, but then it hurts and Sam’s got his eyes on her face so he can gage this, even though she feels like the way she’s digging her fingernails into his shoulder should be indicator enough.  
  
He stops, kisses the ‘sorry’ out of her mouth, and they just stay like that for a minute until she adjusts enough. He doesn’t let her press this, doesn’t go when she has to grit 'okay' between her teeth. He’s bracing himself above her with one forearm, but the other hand brushes over her cheek, over the side of her breast, the outside of her thigh. She can feel him shaking, shivering against this impossible pace with how much he wants it. And it seems to take forever, and minute to minute he’s barely any further inside her, and just when she starts thinking that she’s so _fucking_ frustrated with her inability to do this, and that _he’s_ probably ready to throw in the towel, he kisses her temple and says “Hey, you’re doing good,” and he doesn’t sound at all surprised about it, it’s just… Simple. Just that.  
  
He kisses her, slow slide of his tongue against hers that makes her flex her hands against his shoulder blades where she’s hanging on and she arches her back to try to alleviate some of the pressure. Sam reaches down to press his palm to her lower back where it’s come up off the ground and he moves and they both bite off a noise. He kind of laughs, kind of gasps against her mouth and then says “There you go, you got it,” and he just holds her there against him as she takes that in, feels the press of him all the way inside her.  
  
“Thank _fuck_ ,” Brigitte whispers with genuine relief and when Sam breathes a laugh she laughs too. It’s too tight, sort of wrung out of her, but it comes, and it’s genuine. _Thank fuck._  
  
He kisses her again, then gets his arms beneath her shoulders to hold her, both of them kind of mirroring the other, their hands in each other’s hair. When he moves, it’s slowly, but it rocks them both. It’s totally outside of sex she’s seen, totally outside of her conception of it and so she kind of loses herself in the rhythm without really expecting to. She likes the way his breath shakes against her shoulder. That turns her on more than the feeling itself which is still sort of foreign, but it’s not bad. Not by a long shot. And she waits, kind of, for Sam to be just done, like Ginger said, but it doesn’t come as fast as she thought it would.  
  
He kind of loses the rhythm though, eventually, one hand falls from her hair to press hard against the blanket beside her head, but he’s still cradling the back of her skull with his other hand. He kisses her, tries to, but he’s totally lost to this now and it only lasts a second before he arches a little, over her. She opens her eyes exactly as he comes inside her. She can feel it, this pulsing beat of release. He makes this soft little sound, and then meets her eyes — seems sort of startled to find her looking. She kind of can’t stop though. It’s so impossibly intimate that she’s caught up in it. She only closes her eyes when he leans down and his hair brushes her eyelashes, her face, as he presses his forehead to hers, and they stay that way as he catches his breath.  
  
It hurts when he pulls out, and she’s left with this empty feeling that’s actually kind of nice. Like proof she’s done this, now. She won’t let him try to do anything else for her because she feels _good_ about this. Sam’s fucking blissed, and she likes that. She _did_ that, and she knows trying for more from her own body right now will just result in her being frustrated with herself again. She wants to hold onto feeling good about it for once.  
  
“We should go,” Brigitte says, starting to get dressed again. The sun’s coming up properly, warm and golden. Sam pulls her back down to him and kisses her, and it’s hard to pull away. Still, they both try. They give it a good shot, but a few seconds later they’re kissing again (Sam’s fault, again), standing at the edge of the blanket, and Sam’s fingers brush her bare thigh just below where his shirt hangs, and she’s flooded hot for a moment. “Sam,” she says, the same way he warned her months ago, at home — without any real conviction.  
  
He says “I know,” and she’s the one that kisses him again.

**SAM**

They do though, actually manage to go. Both of them yawning the rest of the way home. He can’t remember the last time he was truly up all night.  
  
“Hey,” he says as the woods end, start turning into buildings. It’s just before they start hitting the red lights of civilization. “What’re you thinking?”  
  
She’s staring out the window, all tucked down in the seat and sleepy. “That…” she says, pulling herself up a little straighter. “It was so much better than I thought it was gonna be. Just… everything. Was better.”  
  
He pulls up at the first red light and looks at her, reaches over to touch the outside of her knee, nudging gently. She meets his eyes. “Any regrets?” he asks her.  
  
She shakes her head, eyes on his. “None.”  
  
“Good,” he tells her. “Me neither.”  
  
~*  
  
“I know what we are,” Brigitte says a moment later. “Partners in crime.”  
  
It takes a minute, but then it clicks and Sam winces. “ _Jesus_ , that’s awful. Your sense of humour…”  
  
“Pamela called it caustic.”  
  
“Well, Pamela got it right. _Jesus_.”  
  
She smiles a little. “Worse than cherry hound, huh?”  
  
“Literally no one else is going to think that’s funny.”  
  
“You do though.”  
  
Sam huffs a breath, eyes on the road.  
  
“You _do_ ,” Brigitte says, and she’s smiling hard enough that she has to look out the window, presses the sleeve of the hoodie over her mouth. Finally Sam cracks.  
  
“I can’t fucking believe you said that.”  
  
Brigitte laughs out loud.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All song quotes in these last two chapters are from Radiohead's album OK Computer. They are "Paranoid Android" and "Exit Music (For A Film)" respectively. If you're interested in music for pairings, I really wanted to include their song "The Tourist", but couldn't find a place to fit it in, since the kids getting shawarma felt more important than more angst. Right?
> 
> Also Ben's definitely gay. I kinda love him. He's the least worst of the normals, you know?


	11. Chapter 11

**SAM**

School starts on the fifth. A fucking Wednesday, who does that? Why not just wait the handful of days to the next Monday? Waking up with her that morning, it’s like a whole other person in his arms, in his bed. She doesn’t speak. She pulls away from him almost immediately, and every movement she makes is harsh and forceful because she's just barely holding herself together beneath her tension. The decisive click of the bathroom door as she goes to shower, the sharp way she puts the coffee cup down on the counter, her hair wet enough that drops slide down her arms, and between her shoulder blades. He watches them slip down to soak into her tank-top and smokes like he can alleviate the stress she’s carrying by sucking down nicotine.  
  
Of course, it doesn’t work.  
  
He doesn’t know what to do for her. She doesn’t want to be touched, her anxiety about school already at a screaming pitch even though she hasn’t left the house yet. She makes that clear when he reaches for her, where she’s drinking her coffee near the sink, and she tips her whole body away from him, her right shoulder twisting forward first, away from his fingers. He raises both hands in capitulation, cigarette hanging from his lips. “Sorry,” Brigitte says, like she means it, but also like she can’t shake enough of her anxiety to do anything more than just function, just cope. She slinks around him in the tight space without even their clothes brushing and goes to the closet. Over the tank-top goes an old-fashioned lace blouse, a button-down flannel and, finally…  
  
She hesitates, her hand hovering over her tan jacket on its hanger, where it’s been since winter ended. She shifts and touches Sam’s, blue corduroy. The one he wore when he first spoke to her. She fingers the button at the cuff of the sleeve and says, very small, “Can I wear this?”  
  
“…Yeah,” Sam says, and watches as she takes it carefully off the hanger and pulls it on. It’s way too big for her, and he takes half a step forward like he might fix it, somehow. But no. She doesn’t want to be touched. And she wears all these layers like armour. Sam feels sick with anxiety _for_ her. “You want me to drive you?”  
  
“There’s greenhouse orders to fill,” she reminds him. “It’s okay.”  
  
“Fuck ‘em. I don’t mind.”  
  
“Can I have a cigarette?” She doesn’t normally ask. He gives her two from his pack and she takes them with shaking fingers. Very gently, he catches the fabric of his jacket at her wrist and, his own smoke still burning between his lips, rolls it up so that it doesn’t hang over her fingers so far. She lets him, still holding the smokes he gave her. He moves to the other sleeve, and she sways a little, his barely-a-touch tugging her at the shoulder. When he’s done, he lets her go, but she gets it. She understands. That’s in place of a hug, in place of a kiss goodbye.  
  
“Thanks,” she says.  
  
“Good luck,” he tells her, almost a joke, but never quite getting there.  
  
She grimaces.  
  
“I’ll see you at lunch.”  
  
“Okay.”  
  
She grabs her bag, and then she’s gone. He listens for the sound of the outer greenhouse door, then exhales a breath but it doesn’t alleviate the tension he carries for her all day long.

**BRIGITTE**

She sits near the back of her homeroom class as they’re all handed out their schedules. They’ve given her a free where she asked for Earth and Space Science. Also, this morning she’s got fucking Phys. Ed. first, kill her.  
  
She trudges to the locker rooms which are only slightly less horrible than the ones at Bailey Downs High School. Hides behind her locker door to change into gym clothes. Everyone clears out before her. She’s last out onto the field, and stands, shoulders hunched, on the sidelines and thinks about how gym feels a thousand years longer when Ginger’s not here with her. Search and Destroy’s no fun if no one’s around to hear it. She’s tired of thinking about death, anyway.  
  
She begs off the last fifteen minutes saying she feels faint and can she please go lay down in the nurse’s office. As soon as she’s out of eye-shot she runs to the pay phones in the main corridor near the cafeteria and finds a quarter to call Sam at the greenhouse.  
  
He answers like he always does, “County Regreening,” and she exhales relief just hearing his voice. “Hey,” she says “Don’t come for lunch today, I gotta talk to guidance.”  
  
“What for?”  
  
“They fucked up my schedule. I think they’re doing it it on purpose.”  
  
Little laugh of contempt. “ ‘Course they did.”  
  
“I know…” She takes another breath. Feels like they’re the first real ones she’s really gotten since she got to school this morning.  
  
“How’re you doing?” he asks her.  
  
“Fine. Had fucking _gym_ first.” She toys with the metal cord, presses closer to the phone, ducking behind her hair, as two guys walk by, talking loudly.  
  
“Putting you through the wringer,” Sam says, soft.  
  
She doesn’t say anything. Neither does he. It’s just quiet for a second or two, and it’s not awkward at all. He gets her; and she kinda just needed to hear him.  
  
The bell goes. Sam hears it over the line. “Okay, sweetheart,” he says, and her heart flies up into her throat. There’s a smile in his voice when he says “Amscray.”  
  
“Bye.” She doesn’t wait for anything else, just puts the phone down into the cradle fast. She stands there for a minute, pressed back against the wall as the halls start to fill up and her pulse returns to something a little more normal.  
  
Anyway. The phone call gets her though second and third period.

**SAM**

Her birthday’s soon, he knows. He remembers it because of all those forms he’d filled out at city hall: September 19th, 1984. And it’s sixteen. A big one. And she’s got no one, really, to celebrate it. He has no idea what her family did for her, if she even wanted her birthdays however they were at home, before everything went down. Probably, he thinks, she didn’t, but Sam has no idea, really, what she would want, or what to do for her now.  
  
Well, no, that’s not entirely true. He has some idea, it’s just that it kind of twists in his chest — makes that missing notch in his collarbone throb.  
  
On top of that, it’s not like the words to the pact she and Ginger made don’t flash through his mind’s eye, even when he doesn’t want to see them…

**BRIGITTE**

Lunch: She really fucking almost gives up on it, they fight her so hard on the science credit. It’s agonizing to talk so much to these people she doesn’t know, to have to explain herself again that she wants to graduate in January, and not do Grade 13 next year. It’s just the idea of doing all of this again next semester when she could just be _done_. She can’t even fathom it, she _has_ to fight it so she does. Finally, they agree to the class but they schedule another appointment in October for her to talk to someone (again) about her — what they clearly think are poor — decisions.  
  
She walks out of there with two minutes to spare before the bell with this sick knot in her stomach like she’s going to puke from the stress but also a dulled sense of triumph, because she’s never won anything for herself before, not from strangers, even if they’re going to talk to her again about it, in a month. God, why can’t they just let her do this?  
  
But she can’t think about it now. She puts her head down on her desk in sixth while the teacher drones about upcoming essays and how to avoid comma splices and dangling modifiers and, with her face buried in her arms, in the smell of Sam, and his cigarettes, on the sleeves of his jacket, she starts to feel better.  
  
It gets her through seventh.  
  
Eighth and final period is biology, which she likes. Which she takes notes on, even with the tension-headache pounding behind her eyes. She’s starving and tired and overwhelmed. But Sam’s waiting for her in the van when the final bell goes, like a godsend, and he’s brought her takeout to make up for the fact that she missed eating lunch. She’s so thankful she could kiss him. So she does.

**SAM**

They’re back to evenings of homework and the tv turned low in about two seconds flat, but he can’t say he minds the routine. He misses her in the greenhouse during the days, but it gives him time to think, and eventually, he decides that, yeah, it might kill him, but he’s gotta go through with his idea for her birthday. It’s only fair to her.  
  
He second guesses himself, though, over and over, until he can barely tell anymore if it’s because it’s a bad idea, or if he just doesn’t want to do it. The only thing that keeps him halfway to sure is that it feels more wrong not to go through with it, now that he’s thought of it in the first place.  
  
He does ask her the evening before (he didn’t mean to, but he’s caving a little because maybe it can wait a year…?) if there’s anything she wants, anything she wants to do, and she looks up at him like she’s surprised he remembered at all. She’s sitting on the couch, surrounded by books as usual. He sits beside her and she clears more of a space for him. “No,” she says, eyes down. “Don’t, that’s okay.” She chews her lip and he waits on it. “Unless,” she says. “I could write the drivers test, if you’ll take me there.”  
  
They’d practiced the rest of the summer with the van. She’s read the driver’s manual, she’s ready to do it. And that’s… yeah, maybe that fits nicely with the rest of it. “Yeah, sure,” he says. “Whatever you want.”  
  
“Have to miss school for that,” she reminds him.  
  
“I know.”  
  
He didn’t go to school on his birthdays, either.

**BRIGITTE**

She was never really one for birthdays. She found the present stuff horribly mortifying even before they made the Pact, and birthdays just became one big step closer to six feet deep.  
  
Skipping though, she liked that. The best part of birthdays used to be Ginger and her pretending to walk to school until they were out of sight of Pamela and the house and then cutting through the playground to be somewhere, anywhere other than class.  
  
They’d take the bus, sometimes, to somewhere else. Still Bailey Downs, but somewhere further out, and they’d spend the day together. Even though every year it became more and more the two of them talking seriously, plotting, planning, on how they were going to die, Brigitte liked it. Liked those birthdays, because they were together, and she was often the sole object of Ginger’s attention — as much as Ginger could focus on anything outside herself, that was.  
  
It’s not like it’s a revelation. Brigitte loved her anyway, always beautiful in her conceit.  
  
She still loves her.  
  
And this is it. This is the birthday. _Out by sixteen._ She thinks about how Ginger had waited — it seemed so selfless to Brigitte at the time, like she was such a fucking drag. The one thing standing between Ginger and gorgeous exultation, exsanguination, extermination. But still, Ginger had waited for her, and the closer sixteen got, the more Brigitte felt like shit, like it was somehow her fault she was the younger one.  
  
Sometimes she wonders… terrible things.  
  
Sometimes she has dreams about hanging herself, doing it right, and as the world goes dark and darker Ginger, standing before her with that knife at her own throat, because wrists are for girls, says ‘I can’t, Bee.’  
  
In these dreams, Ginger lowers the knife to her side and Brigitte thinks _then cut me down_ , but Ginger never does. Ginger always looks so sorry, but Ginger never does a god damn thing about it.  
  
Brigitte wakes up choking, and it’s Sam’s hands that pull her back to the living world. More than once.  
  
She knows what it means. She didn’t notice it, but she feels like she’s worn a noose as a necklace since she was eight years old, and Sam’s been unraveling it, thread by thread all this time. Just until she can reach up and break the knot herself, cast it to the ground.  
  
That’s what she dreams. Her, the rope, Ginger, the knife. They are always in their bedroom, and it closes in around them at the same time as it stretches out forever in that way that only dreams can make sense of. Only this time she gets her fingers around it at her throat and it’s just fraying threads. She pulls it loose and throws the rope down, and suddenly their bedroom is gone, Ginger is gone. The noose is no longer a circle but a three-way split, and it lands in the dirt at her feet.  
  
No, not dirt. Soil.  
  
And she can breathe.  
  
She wakes up on her sixteenth birthday with that realization. That she’s still breathing on her own.  
  
~*  
  
She loves that moment where 7:49 a.m. ticks to 7:50 on Sam’s watch. That’s the start of first period. She loves still being in bed at that moment, being anywhere — anywhere other than school. Sam shifts and makes a sound that’s mostly incoherent, and then squints at her and says “Morning,” and she tucks herself down against his chest.  
  
They sleep in, then they deal with the driver’s test stuff (lines, waiting, more lines, more waiting). It’s afternoon by the time they come back to the greenhouse where he stops her, touching her shoulder, before she reaches the door to his room. “Wait.”  
  
She doesn’t know why, but anxiety suddenly ignites along her limbs like fire. She watches Sam walk around the desk to the register where he unlocks the till and opens it, pulls out this very unassuming white envelope, like the kind banks use and comes back around to her. He’s holding it tightly so she doesn’t reach for it. “Okay, Brigitte…” he begins, and she feels herself almost flinch, her shoulders tightening.  
  
“There’s not really a way to do this without seeming like I’m kicking you out,” he tells her, “but I swear to you, I’m not. So, keeping that in mind…” he holds it out. She takes it — it’s not sealed, thank god, because her hands are shaking — and slides out a cheque. It’s for four thousand dollars. It’s made out to her.  
  
“What?”  
  
“That’s yours, that’s for the time you worked here this summer, roughly give or take some of the hours you helped out before we decided anything.”  
  
She pushes it back. “We said you wouldn’t pay me. We said it defeats the purpose.”  
  
“Brigitte, I can afford it.”  
  
“But that wasn’t the deal.”  
  
“Look, you don’t have to cash it. You don’t cash it, it just stays in my account, it’s whatever. But it’s yours either way. I just… I want you to know you have it. So…” he swallows. “In case you want to do the social assistance thing, I dunno, get your own apartment…”  
  
She’s not looking at him.  
  
“You can keep working here, obviously — I dunno, after school, weekends, whatever you want. If you… if you want to take it and get out of here— like out of Bailey Downs, then… I mean, it’s the deadline, right?”

**BRIGITTE**

She’s shaking, and she has to swallow hard. She’s kind of stuck on one thing — a conversation they had last year.  
  
_“I can’t stay here.”_  
  
_“Why not?”_  
  
_“Because it’s a year.”_  
  
Where the hell did that year go? She feels like everything’s suddenly happening so fast. She doesn’t know what to say. She’s still trying to get a handle on exactly what she feels. She needs something to do so she puts the cheque back into the envelope and folds it in half.  
  
Sam continues, a little urgently. “I just… wanted you to know you had options. You know? I don’t want you to feel like you’re _stuck_ here. That’s… that’s what I'm trying to get at.”  
  
“I never felt like that with you,” she says.  
  
“I really don’t want you to go…” Sam says. “Honestly, Brigitte, I debated not doing this, just in case I could keep you here a little longer, but it— it should be up to you. Your call.  
  
And suddenly things start falling into place. Those days spent in parking lots and back roads, Sam teaching her, infinitely patient, how to drive the van. The money he’s given her — hers, that she worked for. And his words. _I really don’t want you to go…_  
  
Ginger… held her. So fucking tightly. That’s how Ginger loved her. And it was flawed and toxic, but it was the best Ginge could do. And Brigitte doesn’t know why it was like that — she spent a lot of her life thinking that it was because she, herself, was so weak. But she doesn’t think that anymore. She’s starting to see things for what they were, what they _are_.  
  
And yeah, she’s starting to realize exactly what this is. This is how Sam… _what?_ How he cares. How he befriends her, how he wants this to be done. Sam gives her everything he can, everything she needs to be able to stand on her own. So she doesn’t need the trust fall. So she doesn’t need him or Ginger or anyone to catch her.  
  
She’s crying before she can stop herself, just all these silent tears and she sees him tense in her peripheral, from beneath her hair, sees his hands come up like he wants to touch her. She shakes her head. “I’m not sad,” she says, so he doesn’t start freaking. It’s just that no one’s ever given her back to herself before. She says “I want to stay.”  
  
“Good. _Great_ , good,” he says, and it’s all relief. She sneaks a glance at him and sort of laughs because they're both so freaked, and nothing's even happening. It's this desperate, shaking release of tension, but her breathing’s still coming up all wrong.  
  
He reaches for her. “Come here,” so she does, and Sam just holds on. She holds back, as tight as she can.  
  
~*  
  
Later, he fucks her. It’s only the third time they’ve ever done this — the second being a somewhat disappointing and mostly failed attempt where it hurt enough that he stopped, and she used her hands instead but got the sense that neither of them really enjoyed it.  
  
This time is different. This time is minute after minute after minute of skin on skin, her half-shivering because the nights are getting cool again. It’s his mouth on hers. His tongue sliding over his fingers. His fingers between her legs to make her wet with his own saliva. When he slides his cock between her thighs, he doesn’t put it inside her. Instead he just moves against her, velvet-soft, rubbing against her clit, sliding along her slit but never inside. Until the pulse-beat of the ache inside her centres there, and the slickness between her legs is her own and she holds herself in so tightly, her stomach muscles clenched, her thighs pressed around his cock. Sam kisses her neck, and his teeth chatter against the line of her throat. “What’s stopping you?” she asks, voice breathless-low in the dark, and he bites her there, not quite gentle, sucks bruises on her skin, and she likes that, that sharp centering of pain to contrast with the sweet ache below.  
  
The condom takes ten seconds, but it’s ten seconds too long. She reaches down to mimic that sensation he’d given her between her legs, but it’s like an electric shock when she touches herself, way too sensitive, and she snatches her hand away. It’s better when Sam pushes inside her. Slides in like water, this time — painless. It fills an ache she’s got. She clenches around him to get more of it and Sam scrabbles against the sheets and grits out a desperate curse. He distracts himself. He kisses and sucks and bites this constellation of purple marks on her neck, her shoulder, the inside of her breast and she can’t figure out what the hell to do with this want but she gasps against it, and digs crescent-moon weals into his shoulders and writhes and presses and tries to let herself just— let herself go, but she can’t. As soon as he comes, the tension melts onto her bones, settles there like dust that needs to be blown off, and it’s Sam who shakes apart again.  
  
After, both of them sweat-sticky but breathing even again, Sam says “I gotta figure out something to do about this.”  
  
She watches the soft orange glow of the joint he’s smoking in the darkness. The smell of pot is soft and heavy around them. She’s happy. “Maybe coming’s overrated.”  
  
Sam sighs like he thinks different.  
  
“I think I’m starting to get it,” she murmurs a moment later. “Like what the point of it is, but… I dunno. Mostly I like seeing what it does to you.”  
  
“I want to see what it can do to you,” he tells her, softly.  
  
She reaches out and touches the scars at his throat. “Sleep,” she says.  
  
He reaches up to put the joint out, then wraps himself around her.

**SAM**

It’s Brigitte, though, of course, who figures out something to do about it. He supposes he can’t really be surprised. She’s always the one with the master plan, always the one who copes the best in a crisis.  
  
Not that this is a crisis, like, at all. Sam _really_ isn’t going to complain about all these evenings they go to bed way earlier than either of them plan to sleep, and suddenly it's October again. And by now, he’s intimately familiar with the notches of Brigitte’s spine, the birthmark on her stomach, the thin skin stretched concave and almost iridescent between her hips and her pelvic bone. He thinks about last Sunday’s session, no less than half an hour spent between her legs, the salt-taste of her against his tongue. He thinks maybe they got close that time, judging by the way she was breathing, the sounds she made as she clutched the sheets near her hips. Close but no cigar. Still, he’d blissed her out enough that she was half-laughing, afterwards, and too breathless to give in to her frustration when she asked: _“Why is this so hard?”_  
  
He likes the sounds she makes. Likes that she’s so different from other girls he’s gone to bed with. Trina’d had it in her head that she should be loud, unless her parents were around which, thank christ, they weren’t often. She had it in her head that guys like this move or that one — whatever she’d read in Cosmopolitan magazine — until he’d sort of felt like a project she was working on, rather than someone she was sleeping with. Brigitte’s just raw feeling. She has no model to try to imitate. All she has is what she’s seen in old movies and made-for-tv, and what’s been all around her at school these past few years. Brigitte just reacts. She’s all curiosity, and she’s finally started to indulge in that, her slender fingers whispering over his skin in the darkness, sometimes clutching, sometimes pressing. Sometimes her mouth follows. She’s figured out that he likes his hair pulled.  
  
And she’s so open to him now, when they’re like this: protected by the quiet around them and these four walls and their nakedness. He feels desperate to reciprocate somehow. In the soft-lit sometimes darkness of his little room in the greenhouse, he tells her things he’s never told anyone else: how he blamed himself for his father’s suicide, how he sometimes doesn’t know if he’s actually different from the fucking zombies in this town, or just playing it. It’s like, unclothed and together in bed, they just crack one another open further and further to explore all these vulnerable places.  
  
“You’re not playing it.” That's what Brigitte tells him, as she spreads her fingers out against the scars on Sam’s side, beneath his ribs, but the scar is too big for her fingers to reach.  
  
He’s watching her. “Yeah, and how do you know?”  
  
“I can tell.” She looks up at him. “I’ve seen you with them, that’s not you.”  
  
“You know me, Brigitte F.?”  
  
“Yeah, I do,” she says.  
  
It's evening, smells like fall and woodsmoke outside, and they’re just lying together in bed, their clothes in soft heaps on the floor. They don’t always have sex. Sometimes he doesn’t even kiss her before one or both of them falls asleep. She shifts her hand over his side and tries a different angle, fingertips finding the puncture-wounds from the wolf’s longest teeth. She has to extend her fingers as far as they’ll reach and still just barely makes it, and it’s more a testament to how large the wolf was, than how small Brigitte’s hands are. They’re sort of spidery, he thinks, almost like they’re too big for her frame. He reaches down to take hold of it now, pushes it away from him gently and back, pushes back until he’s pinned it to the mattress beside her head, and follows that trajectory until he’s over her, pinning her down.  
  
She shifts beneath him, looking up, raising her left hand as if to say _you don’t have all of me_. Playfully, impulsively, Sam reaches for it, his knees on either side of her hips, but she snatches it away, tucks it beneath her hair behind her head, safe.

Like this, both arms raised up, he can see the ladder-rungs of her ribs. He lets her hand go to slide his fingers down her upper arms, then his palms down over the sides of her ribcage. Cradles her there. She feels very breakable to him sometimes, like he’s going to hurt her accidentally, but he also knows how wrong he is. She isn’t just sticks and stones, this girl, she’s strong. With her right hand released, she draws it down, lays it across her chest like half of a corpse-arrangement, fingers against her opposite shoulder.  
  
Brigitte says “I think your hands are really beautiful,” out of nowhere, and Sam wrinkles his nose a little as he meets her eyes again. _What?_ “Thanks,” he says. “I grew them myself.”  
  
She rolls her eyes. “No, but that’s it, though,” she says. “I like watching you with the plants, it’s… you touch them so carefully. They remind me of what you do or something. Growing things. Sometimes I think that all the other guys do? Is play football and wank.”  
  
Sam laughs out loud. “Some girls like that. The football, not the wanking.”  
  
“Or they pretend they do,” Brigitte says.  
  
“Maybe.”  
  
“Honestly,” Brigitte says, “I think girls are way more beautiful. Just… appearance-wise.” She kind of cocks her head against the pillow, half shrugs one shoulder. “But maybe that’s just ‘cause they always feel like someone’s going to be watching them, so they always have to be that way.”  
  
“Do you feel like that?”  
  
“I try not to,” Brigitte says. “Like, try not to be seen. But that’s just how society works.”  
  
Sam considers her, settles back a little further to smooth his thumb over the soft skin at the top of her outer thigh.  
  
“What if…” Brigitte says, hesitating too long as she weighs whether or not to say this “I can’t do this ‘cause I’m a lesbian or something.”  
  
Sam meets her eyes for the split second before she looks away. “Do you think you are?”  
  
She bites her lip and looks back. “I dunno. Probably.” She says _probably_ like she’s saying _go figure._ “Ginger sometimes said I was a crisis. _'You're a crisis, Bee...'_ Because I can always find a way to fuck everything up, even if it's by accident.”  
  
Sam bites his tongue against what he’d like to say to _that_ , because criticizing Ginger’s off-limits to him. He knows that. Instead he says “You’re not going to fuck up everything. You don’t.”  
  
She doesn’t answer, doesn’t believe him, and he wonders how he’s supposed to get her to unlearn all this. He sighs softly and moves, lying down beside her, his back to the room. She twists onto her side to make space for him and he pulls her close. She gets one of her hands in his hair, smoothing her fingers over the back of his neck.

**BRIGITTE**

Sam’s all relaxed and heavy around her, and it’s hard to be anxious about this when he’s like that. Because he’s not anxious.  
  
Even saying it out loud, that she’s probably gay feels ingenuine, but not completely. Like she’s all these pieces of truth but they’re twisting so fast inside of her that she can’t quite get them to catch the light in the right way so that she can read them, say them out loud and have them be the whole truth and nothing but. She wants to be whole truth with Sam, but it’s hard, because she’s still trying to figure out who Brigitte is when she’s… just Brigitte.  
  
She squeezes her eyes shut, not wanting to go down that solitary road right now. She folds her fingers in the softer hair at the nape of Sam’s neck, pulling very very gently. He takes a breath and says “You know, there’s this cool thing about plants, that… there’s actually male and female ones, according to botanists. Females produce the buds for flowers and male plants produce the pollen which, I mean, you can see why. It’s just a naming system that helps us know which plants will… take over your garden, or which need pollination. And then there’s plants like, uh, like sunflowers or tomatoes which are called bisexual, and, technically, can pollinate themselves, because they’ve got…both androecium and gynoecium reproductive structures. Male and female.”  
  
She pushes herself onto her elbow, twisting her fingers from his hair to hold herself up. “That’s just bisexual as in the sex of the actual plant. It’s not… preferential.”  
  
“I know,” Sam says. “I’m just saying like… all this beautiful stuff happens in nature, you know, nature doesn’t really need humans to survive, even though we need it. Plants can be… bisexual, asexual… wild animals, too. Jesus, fucking… same-sex pairings are documented in corvids, wolves…” He takes a breath. “It’s always people that fuck it all up and say that something’s right or wrong. The way I see it is: if it’s existed that way since before humans even showed up, it’s more natural and… wholesome than societal rules. Just… you can be however you are, Brigitte. I still… it’s not the end of the world.”  
  
There was a moment there. Just a second, where she’d thought he was going to say something else. She’s stuck on that. _I still…_  
  
_Still what?_  
  
She chews her lip, considering that.  
  
“They call bisexual flowers perfect. Perfect flowers,” Sam says. “I dunno, I think that’s really fucking beautiful.”  
  
Brigitte can’t really fight the smile this time. She says “You just want to make sure you can keep doing this with me.”  
  
“You’re not wrong,” he tells her, smiling back. “Why? Do you want to stop?”  
  
“No,” she says. He touches her jaw, slides his knuckles along it. “We’ve already forgotten the Hollywood rules…”  
  
“...Might as well forget the societal ones, too,” Sam finishes. He half-moves to kiss her, and she closes the distance.

**SAM**

They’re creating, he knows, a world in here. Like the one she and Ginger had. They’re creating this understanding around themselves that is flimsy at best out there in the real world, under external scrutiny, but is the very foundations of _them_. He knows that their whole relationship would make a lot of people ask a lot of questions, and assume a lot of things, but fuck it. They’re not _in_ it.  
  
Brigitte’s true to worlds like these and to unspoken promises and those intense understandings that only ever seem to happen between two people. Sam knows that she’s loyal and determined and bends but never breaks under pressure. Not unless she wants to. And he trusts her the same way she trusts him. They’re all they’ve got, and he knows that it could’ve been different, but they made it this way, maybe on purpose, and he doesn’t regret it for a second. They chose each other because they were all they had left, but still, it was a choice.  
  
He rolls onto his back and brings her over him. The bird skull necklace swings like a pendulum between them before she finds his mouth again.

**BRIGITTE**

She still doesn’t quite get the timing and intricacies of sex. Sometimes she feels like everything’s easy. Like Sam can just reach down and slide his fingers inside her like it’s nothing, no resistance, and sometimes — like this time — it takes more. She still doesn't like to touch herself. It doesn’t feel so wrong anymore, but it’s like she can’t figure out her own sensation. She likes the unpredictability of Sam inside her, not the almost-clinical feeling of her own fingers. With Sam, she’s waiting for the next move, and it’s all anticipation. She’s not like Ginger who wanted every move on the fucking dot. She doesn’t get that. She knows, probably, she’s supposed to. Sam kisses her neck. Her thoughts sort of scatter. He slides saliva-slick fingers between her legs and pushes, just barely, barely, the tips of them inside, grinds his palm against her pubic bone, but she needs more than that. It’s not that him being in her ever _quells_ the ache, but it does help, somehow.  
  
Still, she’s starting to feel like every time she just lets it subside, it’s stronger the next time. She feels like it’s going to break her open one of these days, just to escape her body. And — Sam slides his tongue over one of her nipples and she drops her head back as her hips jolt forward into his palm. — And… wait, what was she thinking again?  
  
He reaches for the condoms, left-handed, fingers of his right still inside her. He presses inside all the way to his knuckles and she moans. He watches her, dark-eyed, then pulls out carefully to roll the condom on.  
  
_Oh, right,_ she thinks, coming back once again to her thoughts. It’s unfair that he gets to find all these dark, soft, secret places inside of her, but that everything about him, about male bodies, Sam’s, is so external. It’s so…

**SAM**

She’s looking at him, all intent, but it’s like her head’s not there. She’s warm and solid, sitting astride his hips, but her eyes are somewhere else.  
  
“Brigitte,” Sam says, and she blinks, comes back to him. “You okay?”  
  
“Yeah,” she says, voice almost hoarse.  
  
“What’re you thinking?” he asks her, taking hold of her hip as her fingers touch his on his cock. He lets himself go as she takes him inside. Sam says _Ah_ , and holds onto her thighs for dear life.  
  
“Nothing,” she says. He feels the soft scrape of the bird skull across his throat as she leans over him.

**BRIGITTE**

She likes, she thinks, Sam’s mouth. She likes the way he presses his tongue to his lower teeth when he’s thinking, right before he speaks. She thinks about it a lot — more than she should, maybe. Back when they just met, before she could meet his eyes, when she could only manage a glimpse of his face at best, she remembers his mouth. She remembers thinking, last winter, that there was so much inside people that can’t be touched, and how much she’d wanted to. And now, as she meets that movement of his hips with her own, learning this rhythm, still, she wonders _why not?_ Like what could she possibly do, now, that he’d abandon her for, if it hasn’t been for anything else?  
  
Still, she’s careful when she reaches up, one hand holding herself up by bracing against his shoulder (and, effectively, pinning him down), and with the other she touches shaking fingertips to his lower lip. His eyes were closed, but he opens them now, half a question. And maybe he even starts to ask, and that’s when she slips her fingertips in, just past the bottom row of his teeth.  
  
There’s this flicker of uncertainty, of interest in his eyes, and she almost chickens out. But then he touches his tongue to the tips of her fingers and she loses their rhythm entirely, has to find it again.

**SAM**

She scrambles a little, to sort it out, and he slides his hand around to her lower back and he, curious, kisses her fingers where she touches him, lets his mouth slide over them, a little. And she makes a sound, eyes fluttering shut.  
  
And Sam thinks, _oh, okay._ Scrapes his teeth over her softly to catch her attention again and, slowly, slowly, as she rolls her hips down over his cock, she pushes her fingers into his mouth, pressing down on his tongue, and it shouldn’t be good, but it is, because she shivers all over, goosebumps erupting down her arms so fast he can see them in the light of the bedside lamp and _that_ turns him on.  
  
And _oh_ , Sam thinks, _jesus_. He moans softly, accidentally, and feels it vibrate against her skin. And they go from there. She tastes clean, like salt and she’s got the rhythm now, of his cock inside her, because she’s controlling it with every slide of her fingers, still cautious, still exploratory, into his mouth. She guides this, and he just follows.  
  
_Christ_ , he knows what this is, now. She’s fucking him, like this, she’s getting inside him, and he lets her; he wants her to, and it’s dangerous, deep, and all he can do, finally, is look at her, because she’s pinning him down with barely any force, and it makes him shake, but nothing like the way she’s shaking. There’s not much he can do. He doesn’t suck on her fingers, doesn’t hold her there, doesn’t try to control what she does to him. That’s not what she wants. He just trusts her that she won’t choke him, keeps his mouth just barely open, and tries to keep it soft so his teeth don’t touch her skin. And she’s careful careful careful, but wanting, and she’s starting to lose it.  
  
She shakes so hard it vibrates through them both, and she’s clenched her body tight around his and he can’t take his eyes off her and she can’t take her eyes off his mouth.  
  
When Brigitte comes, he feels it. Not just in the way her fingers press down a little too hard against his tongue, his teeth, but in the way she _drags_ them out, scraping them against his bottom teeth, his lower lip. And then her body clenches hard at the cusp of it all and everything’s so still. Silent.  
  
Sam lets out one soft, desperate sound like he’s been holding it in the whole time she had her fingers inside him, and then Brigitte moans again, grits it out, and her fingers, wet with his saliva, clench against his skin where they’ve fallen against his chest and he feels her body contract around his cock over and over. He’s right there with her, gets his arms around her when she falls against him and they spill into and around each other.  
  
They stay that way for a while. Minutes, maybe, just getting grounded again, taking stock of all of their limbs and how they’re all tangled in one another, collecting, coming back to their separate selves.  
  
“Whoa,” she says, eventually, breaking the quiet, and Sam starts laughing. He feels her smile against his throat.  
  
“How was that for you?” he asks, teasing, because he thinks he’s got a pretty good idea. Carefully he pulls out, presses his mouth hard against her temple, then sits up and mentally braces himself to actually stand up and make the four foot trek to the bathroom where he can clean up a little, and get rid of the condom. “Still think coming’s overrated?” he asks, twisting back to face her.  
  
“Think if you were a girl you wouldn’t have to get up afterwards every time,” she teases back softly. Her limbs are loose. She’s soft as shadows, her dark hair wild against the pillow. Sam’s never seen her quite like that. He catches her hand, presses his lips to the backs of her fingers and their eyes meet. “I liked that,” he tells her, so she knows. So he can see her like this again — and, hopefully, fucking soon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> one of my favourite fic writers once said "be the weird fic you want to see in the world" and I took it to heart. I would like to add a single word in addition, here: "be the weird queered fic you want to see in the world."
> 
> here's the rant no one asked for (you can tell i'm serious because i gave up on capitalization):  
> as a person who identifies as queer/bisexual (attracted to my own and other identified genders) i have been increasingly distressed (but most of all: bored) with the portrayal of heterosexual relationships in media, fic, wherever (whether the people in those relationships identify as such or not). it's time for a revolution here, guys. gender is socially constructed, and people who participate in heterosexual/straight or straight-passing relationships should have just as much room to explore as people in queered ones, and all of these consentual relationships should be able to be explored, intimately, without shame. 
> 
> i realized, while writing this fic, that the reason i so rarely participate in or feel like i enjoy reading or writing opposite-sex couples is because i always thought it was boring. and then i thought: hold up a second, it doesn't have to be.
> 
> so here's this chapter. it's been a time, and this pushing the boundaries of what's "allowed" in "straight" or opposite-sex couples is a theory/project i hope to continue in my future work and, i hope, you guys might too, if that's kinda feelin' like your jam. be brave out there.
> 
> as a side note: i don't want to assign anything to either of these characters. i'm not saying brigitte's bi or straight or a lesbian. she's just trying to figure herself out, and sam's this space where she feels safe to do it. i have gone through so many understandings and assumptions about brigitte's sexuality in my mind, along with her gender-identity and i just think that that's the beautiful thing about fic. it can be anything. it can change and shift from story to story and it's never wrong or right, it just is, if it's done right. 
> 
> i really hope this story's done right, too. also really hope any of this rambling makes sense.
> 
> as always, thanks for reading!


	12. Chapter 12

**SAM**

Saturday morning and he’s standing over the sink, shaving while Brigitte — tucked right into the corner — is sitting on the bathroom counter brushing her teeth, her boots planted against the toilet’s water tank. It’s the only way they can both fit around the sink in his tiny bathroom at the same time, and he sorta likes the proximity.  
  
He’s vaguely thinking that he’s still got to decide whether or not he wants to do the annual blowout this year. It feels sort of fucked up — the anniversary of a death. Thing is, is it makes him cash, and it’ll be weird if he suddenly doesn’t do it, but Brigitte…  
  
He’s about to bring it up, somehow, still half-forming the words in his head when she makes a noise around her toothbrush, spits, and then says “Look.” She drops her toothbrush into the holder, then digs her fingers into her messy hair, combing a few strands free from the rest.  
  
Sam takes them in his hand. It’s not like wolf-colours, all lunar-silver like snow, but it’s definitely grey hair, as long and messy as the rest. “Huh, yeah,” he says, and sort of follows it to the root, and she’s pliant beneath his hands, letting him look. He turns her face the other way and when he pushes her hair back behind her ear she tilts her head, so easily touched now. He knows this is a privilege. He finds more greys behind her left ear, buried beneath the rest, still just brown. “Oh, Brigitte,” he says, half laughing. He doesn’t know why it hits him — it’s all to do with pigment and genetics and has nothing, really, to do with fear or stress or hardship — but his heart kinda breaks a little.  
  
She takes the pieces he’s found and studies them with mild curiosity, then lets them fall against her shoulder. She twists her mouth a little, studying him. “ _You_ don’t have any.”  
  
And it’s true, he thinks, eyes flickering to his reflection, he doesn’t.  
  
Somehow that doesn’t seem very fair.

**BRIGITTE**

Ginger, she thinks on Wednesday morning, would have dug this. It’s like the suburbs is slowly sucking the life force out of her, like it starts with pigment until everything is grey. Ghost-town, zombie-apocalypse grey. It’s pouring rain so Sam drives her to school and all the buildings are grey, the school still surrounded by fog this early in the morning.  
  
It’s Halloween. They’re doing the blowout because he always does it. Because they need money for the winter. Because it looks suspicious if they don’t. Brigitte knows this, she agreed to it, pushed for it, even, and she helped Sam move all the plants to put out the hay bales and whatever else for the party… but it sits sourly in her stomach. Also, today’s her meeting with guidance.  
  
Suffice to say she’s felt sick all morning. She doesn’t want to do this at all — this day, this evening. She wants, more than anything, to stay in Sam’s bed and hide beneath the covers and sleep until it’s over. She barely feels real, and it’s been a year since Ginger died.  
  
“Just get through this one day, and you’re done in two months,” Sam reminded her, sitting beside her on the bed that morning when she didn’t get up at six, or when Sam got up, or any of the three or four times he told her to because she was going to be late. She had the covers pulled up almost over her head, thinking how much she’d like to just stay here all day, listen to the rain on the roof. But he’s right.  
  
“What if they say no?” Brigitte asks, looking out the window of the van at the other students as they disappear into the fog around the school like ghosts.  
  
“Don’t let them.”  
  
She sighs, sinks further down in her seat. “Easy for you to say.”  
  
“When’s your appointment?”  
  
“Lunch,” Brigitte says, “So…”  
  
He nods. _Don’t show._ “Let me know how it goes, if you can.”  
  
She nods. The warning bell goes. She braces herself as best as she's able.

**SAM**

He’s watching the clock as soon as lunch hour starts, but she doesn’t call. Five minutes to Brigitte’s first class after lunch the nerves get to be too much, and he’s already shaky from nicotine, so he goes into the back and pours a shot of Old Goose but it doesn’t really help much. He puts the bottle away before he drinks more because he’s got to go pick her up in a couple hours and there’s no way he’s going to miss her, even if it's only to hear bad news.  
  
The thing is is that he knows Brigitte will be able to make it through another semester. This school’s better for Brigitte than Bailey Downs High School, it’s smaller, more run down, but she’s not so much of a walking target there. Hell, even if it were her old school, she could still rough it. She’s tough, Sam knows it, it’s just that it shouldn’t have to be that way.  
  
He wonders if it would be easier for her, if she made friends. There’s a couple of names that crop up here and there, people she’s grouped with in projects. Brigitte sits with them, works with them, when she has to, but they aren’t friends.  
  
_“Do you want them to be?” he’d asked her once._  
  
_Brigitte had hesitated, then said “I’ll never be able to really be friends with anyone again. I mean… I can never tell them about so much of my life.”_  
  
_He had to give her that, but: “Lots of people keep secrets,” Sam said._  
  
_Brigitte had looked up at him. “We don’t.”_  
  
_“Yeah, so... still, I mean, you had to tell me in the first place. And I’m still here.”_  
  
_“You saw it. You hit the first one with your van. You were already involved.”_  
  
_Maybe friendship always happened by accident. Still, he wonders now if he should have pushed her a little harder to make friends at school, but he likes that he’s special. Even if it’s just because he was speeding on the 403 one night._  
  
_“Still don’t believe in fate?” he asked her, watching her underline something in her textbook in the lamplight._  
  
_“No,” she told him, capping the pen. “But I think… something lined up for us that night. I think that was on purpose. It’s like what you said about energy following the path of least resistance. Like… I needed someone… and there you were.”_  
  
Sam’s at school by 2:55 sharp. He can’t read her, and her hair’s partially obscuring her face anyway. She pulls open the van door and immediately says “I need you to sign stuff.”  
  
“What stuff?”  
  
“Permission form.”  
  
“Jesus, in there?”  
  
She gives him a look that says _I go to this godforsaken place every day, you can take five minutes._ “It needs to be witnessed. She said she’d do it now. Please.”  
  
Sam takes a breath. “Just let me park.”  
  
And it’s weird. It’s definitely weird, trailing her through the half-empty corridors. She moves through this space like she’s waiting for bombs to drop at any moment. He gets a few curious glances and tries not to meet anyone’s eyes. He knows this is going to be awkward, he just isn’t exactly sure how to brace himself for it. Brigitte leads him to guidance.  
  
The middle-aged woman at the desk gives him a distasteful once-over like he’s a squeegee kid and she’s just parked a nice new Volvo at a stoplight. She goes into the back to call someone else and Sam thanks whatever gods are listening that it’s not her he has to deal with.  
  
The woman who’s been Brigitte’s guidance councillor is blonde, wears glasses. She looks better suited to a tarot shop, Sam thinks, and it’s crazy but it puts him at ease more than the lady behind the desk still looking at him like he’s about to rob them all at gunpoint.  
  
They make introductions that Sam barely registers, then sit across a table from one another on separate couches and Sam suddenly realizes exactly what’s Brigitte’s guidance sessions have been like and it takes everything in him not to light up a cigarette right then and there just to survive it  
  
“Brigitte, why don’t you come sit?” the guidance woman says — what was her name? June? Joan? Shit, he’s not great at this. If he fucks this up for Brigitte he’ll never forgive himself. Sam doesn’t even need to look around for Brigitte, he can feel her presence in the doorway, palpable desperation to get the hell out of here. It’s making him nervous. Brigitte comes, though. She’s holding her arms around herself tightly, boots scuffing the floor. She must seem such a juxtaposition, Sam thinks. Everything about her screams delinquent and here she is, skipped a grade and hoping to graduate early. She sits beside him carefully, detangles herself from her bag. She’s very careful not to touch him, but her fingers flicker, looking for something to hold onto. He sees it in his peripheral, and his first instinct is to reach out. Simultaneously, both of them close their fingers in something else. Brigitte takes a fistful of her hair and drags it across her mouth. Sam pushes his hands into the pockets of his coat and realizes immediately that that definitely doesn’t scream ‘professional’ or ‘capable’ in any way. He takes them out.  
  
He really fucking hates this.  
  
“Okay,” June or Joan says, pushing long hair over her shoulder before she turns the forms towards Sam. She goes over everything. She powers through Sam and Brigitte's extreme aura of _I don’t want to be here_ coming at her from the opposite couch.  
  
Coming to the end of her explanation, Joan — it _is_ Joan, now he remembers, looks up at him. “Brigitte, as I’m sure you know, is very academically gifted.” Beside him Brigitte’s biting her nails, totally hidden beneath her hair. “It’s my opinion that she should stay, do Grade 13, just so she has the chance to do university.”  
  
“I know she is,” Sam says. “But this isn’t for her. And anyway, if she wants to do university, later, we’ll figure it out, we always do.”  
  
We. Should he have said _I_? He doesn’t know anymore. What would he say, if he _was_ only her legal guardian? What’s he _supposed_ to say? He doesn’t know, but it comes out exactly how he means it.  
  
“If it’s an issue of funding, there’s scholarships. I would be more than happy to write her a reference.”  
  
“It’s more an issue of objectionable environment,” Brigitte says, both genuinely honest and deeply scathing at once, and Sam has to bite the inside of his cheek to stop from laughing out loud.  
  
Joan glances at desk-woman, sort of hides a smile behind her hand as she pretends to fix one of her earrings. “Okay,” she says, and she’s got her eyes on Brigitte — looks until Brigitte looks up. “If this is really what you want to do.”  
  
Brigitte nods, holds her eyes.  
  
Joan hands the pen to Sam, and he signs the forms. Joan signs at witness, and then he and Brigitte are out of there. Free.  
  
They don’t look at each other, don’t even walk too close together on the way to the van in the school’s parking lot. She shoots him this quick look though as they pull the van doors shut, all overwhelmed disbelief. He grins at her, and when she smiles back, she doesn’t hide it at all.

**BRIGITTE**

The high is a little short-lived though. It’s the 31st — Halloween — and Sam’s put the finishing touches on the greenhouse for the party. She makes her way to the back room without really looking at the decorations and he follows after her.  
  
She dumps her school stuff, drops down heavily onto the couch and watches Sam over the back of it as he puts the dishes away that she did last night.  
  
“Are you going to be out there, all night?” Brigitte asks, “In the greenhouse?”  
  
“Probably for most of it, yeah,” Sam says. “I’m assuming you’re staying in?”  
  
“I kind of don’t want to be here at all,” Brigitte admits.  
  
He holds her eyes for a second, then nods, puts the last few glasses away. “Where are you going to go?”  
  
But she doesn’t know. She knows where she wants to be. She wants her old bedroom, she wants their twin beds, and their candles burning and staring at the ceiling as they talked together for hours. She wants _“this is wall worthy”_ and _“that’s why the big Buddha made me”_ and _“together forever.”_  
  
Except the thing is that it’s all tied up in everything terrible. In the first time Brigitte ever lied to her, in cleaning the blood up in the bathroom after Ginger tried to cut off the part that marked her as a monster, in feeling the last breath she ever took.  
  
“I don’t know,” she says. Because there’s nowhere else. “I’ll think about it, okay?”  
  
“Yeah,” he tells her. “Whatever you want.”

**SAM**

He doesn’t make supper because he knows neither of them are going to eat it. Brigitte curls up in a tight ball in the bed, sleeps a while, and he leaves her to it. Thinks maybe it’d be better if she slept straight through til morning, because then he’ll know where she is, but the girl’s got a near-perfect internal clock and she wakes up just before people start to show. She sits on the edge of the bed for a minute or two, just quiet and then, finally, she asks “Can I take the van?”  
  
Sam grimaces a little, presses his teeth together and tilts his head. _I don’t know, Brigitte._  
  
“Please,” she says. “You know I’m careful.”  
  
She’s got her I.D. now. It’s just that she’s not supposed to be driving without someone else in the car, and so she’s never gone out by herself.  
  
“Take it where?” he asks.  
  
“Just… somewhere quiet. The look-off, maybe,” she says. “It’s only… fifteen minutes from here. You can see the greenhouse from there. Sam, I swear I’ll be careful.”  
  
It’s stupid, it’s absolutely fucking insane, but he softens when she says his name. He feels like hers just tumbles from his lips all the time, but she almost never calls him by his. And maybe she knows it. He thinks she might, judging by the way she’s looking at him.  
  
“There’s… gonna be people around tonight, Brigitte, you know,” he says. “Up there?”  
  
“It’s raining,” she reminds him. “People won’t stay out. I can’t be here tonight. I thought maybe I could, but I can’t.”  
  
And he gets it. And he knows that she came to the bush party in the summer for him, and he wants nothing more than to go with her, tonight, but he can’t, because he’s got to be here. In case anything goes wrong, in case the cops show… He sighs. “Okay,” he tells her. “But… bring something, some kind of weapon… jesus…”  
  
Brigitte picks up the wooden box from the end of the bed and opens it up, shows it to him. Two syringes, the bird skull necklace, the picture of her a Ginger, and Sam’s harvesting knife. “I wondered where that went,” he says softly. She closes the box again, takes a hoodie from the closet and pulls it on. She slips the box inside the pocket and meets his eyes.  
  
Sam hands her the van keys. “I wish you wouldn’t,” he says softly.  
  
“I’ve got to,” she tells him, and takes them from his fingers.

**BRIGITTE**

He follows her out to the front, flicking off lights behind them as they go. She pulls her hood up against the rain, both of them standing pressed close together in the doorway. “See you after, though, Brigitte, right?” Sam says to the crumbling stone step beneath their feet.  
  
Something jolts through her, hard. Because he’s letting her go off with the van and the knife. She could go anywhere. She could leave anything she wants to behind, including this world as she knows it. And Sam knows that. She looks up at him, eyes searching his face. She waits until he looks at her, before saying “I’m not leaving you.”  
  
He holds her eyes, wets his lower lip. “Okay,” he says.  
  
There’s a beat, just the sound of rain falling, and then she steps out into it. He watches her, waits until she climbs into the driver’s seat, then he switches the string lights on, and everything is washed eerie and orange. Brigitte catches his eyes through the windshield, then fixes the mirrors so she can see, pulls her seat forward — she has to wrench the handle up — and then she backs up and pulls out. She’s not even a minute up the road when cars full of party-goers start passing her going the opposite direction. Once she turns off onto the old road that winds a meandering path up to the top of the look-off, it’s so much quieter. The radio’s been playing low, but she turns it all the way off now. Without Sam, and on the main street, she’d been holding the steering wheel a little too tight, but now, in the silence and the darkness and the rain, protected by the van’s walls, she relaxes a little.  
  
She was right, about the rain. There’s nobody up here, and when she parks she can see the greenhouse through the windshield, all lit up like a beacon in the night. The water running down the windshield makes it waver and flicker like a balefire.  
  
Even though she senses she’s alone, she cracks the windows anyway, just so that she can hear around her. A little bit of rain gets in, cold, but it’s okay. She places the wooden box on the seat beside her and opens it up, picks up Ginger’s bird skull necklace and just holds onto it. She doesn’t cry.  
  
Eventually, the sound of the rain rain lulls her and she sets the wooden box open on the dash and huddles down in the driver’s seat. Twists sideways, her feet up on the passenger side and, with her sister’s necklace against her heart, Brigitte closes her eyes.

**SAM**

Selling goes okay. Could be better, but no one wants to go out in this rain, and the greenhouse fills up with smoke from pot and cigarettes and everyone’s probably breathing enough in to get high anyway.  
  
His thoughts are way up on that hill with Brigitte. He hopes she’s okay, hopes she’s not doing anything stupid, hopes she’s not too hurt, too sad up there, alone. He hopes he hasn’t made the biggest mistake of his life.  
  
He thinks about the harvesting knife and the scars on Brigitte’s left palm and about the way she’d looked when she said she wasn’t leaving. Christ, he hopes she means it.

**BRIGITTE**

Suddenly there’s this… sound. At first she thinks it’s rain, this little _tap tap, tap tap_. When she realizes it’s coming from the back of the van she goes very still. Because it’s probably just an animal or something. Squirrels get in there, sometimes. It just wants to get out.  
  
Slowly, slowly she sits up. There’s nothing around her. She reaches for the knife with her eyes on the glow of the greenhouse far below and holds it tightly in her hand. It shakes, but she doesn’t know if it’s her or the grip she has on it.  
  
_Tap tap, tap tap tap._  
  
Every ghost story she’s ever heard seems to come back to her at once. The woods yawn darkly to her left. To her right is the road, lonely as it was when she drove up here. She twists back, so slowly, afraid of what she’s going to see in the little window to the back of the van, but all that she can see through the glass and the chain link is darkness.  
  
Brigitte spends too many minutes frozen with fear in the driver’s seat, clutching the knife, but finally, she pushes open her door and slips out into the rain and the night. As she walks around to the back doors, the wet ground sucks at her boots like it wants her. Like it wants to pull her down.  
  
The back handle’s been fixed. Sam fixed it months and months ago and she holds the knife with her arm crossed across her chest so she can swing it down, if she has to, and pulls one of the back doors open with her left hand. And there’s nothing. Confused, she pulls open the other. Not even an animal…  
  
There’s nothing at all.  
  
She feels a little like she’s losing her mind, but her breathing calms, her heart-rate slows. She turns around to face the night. Nothing.  
  
She’s getting soaked out here, and there’s nothing else to do now except switch her knife hand and close the van up. Climbing back into the driver’s seat,  Brigitte pulls the door shut after her and, as she turns back to face front, she places her right hand on the passenger seat for balance. Or that’s what she means to do.  
  
Instead her hand falls on something warm. Someone else’s rings press cold into the soft places of her palm. Brigitte makes a sound halfway between a gasp and a scream and snaps her head around to look, but there’s no one there. Even though she’s already snatched her hand back out of shock, the sensation of that touch — her fingers half-interlaced with someone else’s — was impossible to mistake. Because it’s a hand she’s spent her entire life holding onto.  
  
Her breathing flies into these short, panicked gasps as she stares into the empty space beside her where Ginger should have been sitting — would have to have been sitting for Brigitte to touch her like that.  
  
Brigitte says her name — _Ginge?_ — out loud, but no one answers her. Eventually her breathing calms again. Maybe she really is losing her mind, only she isn’t. She knows, somehow, that she isn’t. And whoever, whatever was here doesn’t feel like it’s here anymore.  
  
She loses some time. Doesn’t know how long she sits up there with her fingers clenched into a fist like she can hold onto her somehow. It’s long enough that her fingers ache, and she has to flex them a little to get the blood flowing right.  
  
The greenhouse lights go out far below her. Party’s over. Half-collected, Brigitte starts getting herself together. She pulls the wooden box off of the dash and puts the knife back inside it. That’s when she realizes that Ginger's bird skull necklace is missing. She passes a hand over the passenger seat in the half-dark, then, with a soft “ _Shit_ ,” she leans down to sweep her palm over the floor of the van, but she can’t find it. It’s gone.  
  
Panic rises in her chest. It can’t be gone. Did she drop it outside? She twists to push open her door again, but she doesn’t even get there before the back of her hand knocks something hard. The bird skull swings from the van’s key in the ignition. Brigitte slowly reaches down to touch it, to still its circular motion. The cord was broken when Ginger changed, Brigitte _knows_ that, but it’s tied together, now, around the loop of the key as though someone’s fastened it there.  
  
Brigitte’s shaking, but a strange peace settles over her.  
  
Because the message is clear. _What are you still doing here, Bee?_

**SAM**

The cops didn’t make an appearance this year, so that’s good for him. He’s sold about two thirds of what he hoped to, but he’s not thinking about that, now. Instead he’s standing in the doorway, watching the rain fall, and waiting for her headlights to show.  
  
They do, about half an hour later, and relief floods his chest.  
  
She shuts the van off and crosses to him, the wooden box clutched to her chest and, by way of greeting, says “I have to show you something,” as she slips past him. So there’s nothing else to do but follow her — through cans and bottles and all kinds of roaches and cigarette butts he’s going to have a hell of a time picking up tomorrow — to the back room.  
  
Inside, she flicks on the lamp and turns to him, passing him his keys. The bird skull swings, and he catches hold of it. “What’s…?”  
  
“I didn’t do that,” she says, indicating the knot. “I…” she struggles for a second. “You’re going to think I’m crazy.”  
  
“No I won’t,” Sam promises her.  
  
They sit on the bed, facing one another, as Brigitte tells the story. The bird skull, still tied to his keys, is laid out on the mattress between them. And they’re right back to _wouldn’t believe it a little over a year ago…_ When she finishes, they’re both quiet, lost in their own thoughts.  
  
“So what’re you saying?” Sam asks her, finally, once he can’t stand the silence anymore.  
  
“I think she wants me to go,” Brigitte says, eyes down.  
  
He touches the keys where the cord it knotted, rubs his thumb over the metal gently. “I mean… yeah. That’s what it seems like.”  
  
She looks up at him, trying to figure him out. Her voice hollow, she says “You don’t believe me.”  
  
“It’s not that,” he tells her.  
  
“What, then?”  
  
“I just thought we were… I dunno… I dunno.” But what did he think? They’ve never said they were anything other than partners in crime, and that was a joke. But, still, they’re friends. Shouldn’t friends be enough to keep her here, with him? Brigitte’s running her finger gently down the beak of the bird skull on the mattress and Sam finds himself thinking ‘what about the plants?’, ‘what about the greenhouse?’ because it’s easier than thinking ‘what about me?’ But no, of course she was going to leave. He was kidding himself to think otherwise.  
  
“It’s just… once I graduate, there’s nothing else keeping me here anymore.”  
  
Sam stiffens because _ouch_ , that _hurts_. Way more than he ever thought it would. It’s as though Brigitte’s just lashed out at him with that harvesting knife, and he looks up at her wondering _What happened to ‘I’m not leaving you’?’_ and then he’s thinking to himself: _What did you expect, you idiot? You’ve given her everything she needs to go. And besides, you’ve never been enough to get anyone to stay. Not even your dad; and not this girl…_  
  
He realizes, suddenly, that he’s going to cry, so he gets off of the bed fast, crosses the room just so that she doesn’t see it, because it’s awful and embarrassing and this isn’t _about_ him. But fucking _isn’t_ it? He really thought they were both in this, him and Brigitte. Shows what he knows.  
  
In the kitchen, he pulls out the bottle. He barely drinks anymore, but she gives him this look of disappointment anyway. Sam tips the bottle back, swallows some down, and the burn in his chest clears up the burn in his nose, and behind his eyes.  
  
“You’re mad?” she asks, halfway to accusatory.  
  
“I’m _not_ , I’m— jesus, Brigitte, I’m fucking… I thought we were in something, here, you and me, and you’re just gonna go off chasing _ghosts_?”  
  
“I’m not _chasing_ anything,” Brigitte counters.  
  
“Sounds like you are.”

**BRIGITTE**

Okay, she really thought that Sam would be in this with her, but then he says ‘Sounds like you are’, and what she hears is ‘I’m not coming with you.’ She hears ‘I’m not in this, if it means leaving here.’ Suddenly everything, every safe moment with him feels like a lie. The way he let her inside him feels like a lie, the way he took her blood. She can’t get her lungs to work for a second, and her eyes fill with tears, but she is _not_ going to let herself cry now. Not over a guy. Especially not when he’s suddenly pulling out of this… this thing that’s gone above and beyond her wildest dreams for a connection with anyone other than Ginger.  
  
“So, wait, I decide to leave here and suddenly you’re out? You’re going to shit on me about the reason _why_?”

**SAM**

This is it, Sam thinks, this is how this ends. Because of a fucking ghost story. Because he really is just… background noise to her, in the story that’s still just her and Ginger.  
  
But then Brigitte says “I thought you’d want to come with me.”  
  
Beat.  
  
_Wait._  
  
Sam tilts his head. “Hang on,” he says, “What?”  
  
Silence settles awkwardly between them as they both try to figure out where they’ve come up at odds with one another. Finally Brigitte asks “You think I’d take off without you? You think I’d do that, _now_?”  
  
“I _didn’t_ think so, but then you’re all ‘there’s nothing keeping me here anymore’—”  
  
She’s incredulous, confused, until finally she can’t hold his eyes anymore and looks away, sort of struggling for breath.  
  
But he’s starting to put it together, maybe too late. “Brigitte—” he begins.  
  
She looks back at him, and her eyes are very bright, very wet. He’s hurt her, somehow, and he doesn’t know when. “I said there’s nothing keeping _me_ here because _you’re_ the one who’s stuck,” she says, voice barely steady. “You’re the one who loves this place, no matter what you call it — the _family_ fucking _crypt_. _You’re_ the one with the— the fucking _business_ , the grow-op on the side. It’s been so easy for me to stay here with you.” Her voice is starting to pull _so_ tight. She takes a second to steady herself before she speaks again. “I thought I’d never find that again. _There’s nothing keeping me here but you_. Because asking you to leave something you love?” She waves an arm vaguely in the direction of the plants, the black orchid growing steadily on the table. “That’s pretty selfish.”  
  
Sam’s frozen in place as they just hold one another’s eyes, and she’s right. He hates this suburb, but he loves this place — the greenhouse… he knows that, but more than that… _more_ than that, he loves—  
  
Brigitte tips her chin down, glaring at him from beneath her hair. “I already told you I wasn’t leaving you,” she reminds him, a little bit scathing. “Or did you forget that already?”  
  
He licks his lips, then says “I don’t think Ginger would want it to be just you and me, out there.”  
  
Brigitte takes that in, shakes her head. “You can’t know that,” she says, and she’s collected again, quietly self-possessed. “And anyway, _I_ want you to come. I want you with me.”  
  
Sam feels like he’s been grabbed and shaken. “…Fuck,” he says.  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“I’m… I misunderstood.”  
  
“I’ll say,” she says, and it comes out bitter.  
  
Sam tips the bottle in his hand and looks down at it because he can’t quite look at her when he says this. Instead, he watches the amber liquid catch the light. It takes everything in him to get it out, but he does, he has to. “Yeah, you know…” he swallows. “It’s habit. ‘Cause… everyone leaves. Everyone else… left—” He can’t say ‘left _me_ ’. Even though that’s what they did, Sam can’t say it out loud because it feels too fucking pathetic. And, maybe, it still feels like his fault.  
  
Brigitte watches him quietly from across the room. He sees her in his peripheral as she slowly, carefully unfolds herself from the mattress. She crosses the room silently and takes the bottle from his fingers, sets it on the counter, and then she wraps her arms around him, presses her face into his shoulder. She holds onto him, tight, and whispers “I won’t. So are you going to come with me, or do we stay?”  
  
He wonders if he ever would have realized he loved the greenhouse before she came along. Before he spoke it out loud to someone who cared. And here she is, willing to give up on this thing she’s wanted since she was eight years old: The hope of someplace better.  
  
Of course, he’s already got his answer to her question.  
  
~*  
  
November dawns cold, with a blinding white sky and Brigitte sleeping with the backs of her fingers resting softly against his throat and Sam can’t help but think: this is the start of something.  
  
She unties Ginger’s bird skull from his keys before she goes to school, but it doesn’t go back in the box. Instead it sits on top of it, all day long and doesn’t move a centimetre. Not that Sam expected it to. He knows that the whole thing could be an elaborate story — something she just cooked up out there on the look-off, to create for herself a path out of the bleakness of this suburban town. She lied to him, after all, about being the one who was changing. She lied about _everything I look at goes silver bullet, in a gun, to my head, the end_. Except the thing is, is he doesn’t take her for a liar. She isn’t one, naturally, she was just trying to do what was right. So he thinks it, logically, as he stands with his coffee in the doorway to the greenhouse proper, and takes in all the cups and cans and butts he’s going to have to clean up. He thinks it, but there’s no heat to it, because he just doesn’t think she would do that. He does believe her. He doesn’t know if it’s _ghosts_ , but something happened to her up there, and she’s taken it to be true.  
  
That’s all he needs.

**BRIGITTE**

At school, in Chem., she thinks about people’s minds and how they work and how it’s not always easy to convey what you mean. She thinks that that was the first time they really misunderstood one another, her and Sam. She thinks that with Ginger, it always came back to blood. You can’t break up with blood. You can’t divorce your sister. You just can’t. But with Sam, she thinks, all this time she’s been terrified of something like this happening, of saying the wrong thing, of fucking up somehow… and yet here they are. They’re okay. And she woke up against the warmth of him just like every other morning and promised to help with greenhouse cleanup as soon as she got back from school and everything was the same.  
  
And looking back over it, over everything that’s happened from one Halloween to the next, Brigitte starts to see the big picture — connecting it dot by dot by dot, and not just living inside of it. Sam letting her stay; Sam forgiving her, absolutely; Sam teaching her about living things and how they could be as beautiful and freeing as she thought death might be. Sam who’s become blood with her on purpose. Whose blood runs through her, too. And maybe they stumbled blindly through a lot of this, maybe some things were for the wrong reasons, maybe… maybe he’s the main thing that came between her and Ginger, maybe he saved her life. Maybe she said that she was supposed to leave, last night, in that nebulous way, because she wanted to give Sam one more chance at getting out of this. Because she wanted to see what he would do.  
  
Sam, who made her meet his eyes, last night, and told her _The only thing that’s going to make me leave, Brigitte, is if you don’t want me with you anymore._  
  
And all those dots, over all those months form into something a little clearer — the outline of something she’s only just figuring out, like stars forming a constellation. At first you can’t see it…  
  
And then you do.  
  
_Oh, shit_ , she thinks, and the beaker she’s holding slips from her fingers and falls to the floor where it shatters.  
  
The whole class looks at her.  
  
“Shit,” she says out loud, and then, catching the teacher’s eyes, “I mean, sorry.” A few titters around her and it’s enough to bring her back to the real world. She shakes herself mentally, face hot, and, hiding beneath her hair, goes to get the broom to clean it up.  
  
~*  
  
She walks back to the greenhouse after school to find it mostly cleaned up. Sam’s not in the back so she goes back out into the main part to see if there’s anything else she can do, but it’s mostly just decorations left.  
  
“Hey,” he says from the front door, startling her a little. She swings around, and everything she realized today floods back to her, and the way he held her eyes last night floods back to her, and her heart flies up into her mouth so she doesn’t say anything.  
  
Sam takes one look at her face and says, all trepidation, “What?”  
  
Shaky breath. “Nothing. Sorry.”  
  
“Really, nothing?”  
  
Brigitte can’t even look at him. It feels like the beginning — just meeting him all over again, where she couldn’t even bear to meet his eyes. She looks over the greenhouse instead. “I said I’d help,” she says, changing the subject.  
  
“Yeah, you can help me bring the plants back in. And then you can help me, I dunno, mark them down, because I have no fucking idea how we’re going to get rid of all this stuff before we clear out of here,” Sam says, lighting a cigarette.  
  
Because they’re really doing this. They’re really leaving.  
  
She feels shaky as she moves to go start collecting the plants from the storage shed. Sam catches her wrist as she passes him. “Seriously,” he says, “what is it?”  
  
“Just— weird day at school.” It’s a lie and she winces, backtracks, because she’s already decided she wants to be whole truth with Sam. “Or… I just…”  
  
“Hey, you’re freaking me out here.”  
  
“Sorry,” Brigitte says, and her eyes flicker to his, briefly. “It’s just…” she works on extracting her wrist gently from his fingers and, with her eyes down says. “Um. I love you, I think, so… I gotta go. Get the plants.”  
  
Freed, she slips out the door. It bangs shut behind her.

**SAM**

Sam just stands there, frozen, watches her slip out. He forgets that he’s lit a cigarette and it just hangs from his lips.  
  
He’s still standing there when she comes back, arms around a potted philodendron. She looks at him, sighs, and says “Please don’t. I can’t.”  
  
“No, hang on,” he tells her, taking the cigarette from his lips. “Did you just say what I thought you did?”  
  
“Can we just do this?” Brigitte asks, meaning the work, voice pitching higher as her anxiety rises. She’s clinging to that plant for dear life. Sam can feel himself shaking. He can’t help himself when he laughs, just a breath at first, overwhelmed by it, and then harder because it’s ridiculous, and of course she would do it this way. He takes a step forward.  
  
She takes a step back, bristling like a pissed off cat.  
  
“Brigitte.”  
  
“Seriously, shut up please.”  
  
“Okay,” he says, drawing back just a little. She’s not going to let him talk, but he can’t stop smiling, it’s ridiculous. “Okay.”  
  
She turns and puts the plant where it belongs, then stomps past him on her way out to the shed for more. There’s nothing else to do but take the decorations down to make space. “Use the fucking— wheelbarrow at least,” he calls after her, because it’s going to take forever if she does it one by one.

**BRIGITTE**

She was too scared to let him say anything back. She feels stupid for just letting it spill out of her like that, and they don’t talk much over supper, but it’s a soft silence, companionable, still, even though she’s fucking agonizing about the whole thing. Because she doesn’t know how people do this, how it’s supposed to work. Everything she’s seen or read was so… melodramatic or something, makes her squirm a little, but she thinks that at least she could have done better than _I gotta go get the plants._  
  
She can’t focus on her homework, so she goes to shower and when she comes out, dressed for bed, Sam’s done the dishes and the TV’s already off — it’s very quiet. He turns off the lamp beside the couch, leaving only the one on the bedside table to light the space, and he joins her in that little circle of light, but doesn’t touch her. She chews her nails, steeling herself, then half looks up, just for a second. “Can you just say whether you do or not, like yes or no?” Because it’s too much to hear the whole sentence come out of his mouth, because she doesn’t feel like it’s right, after she screwed up her part so badly. Because she can’t wait, anymore, to know, but she doesn’t want to force him to say those words if it isn’t coming naturally.  
  
Does he or doesn’t he?  
  
Sam exhales softly through his nose, not quite a laugh. He waits until she looks at him, until she’s holding his gaze.  
  
“Yes,” he says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry not at all sorry, there's going to be another chapter.
> 
> the lines about You can’t break up with blood are directly from Karen Walton's original script.


	13. Chapter 13

**BRIGITTE**

Brigitte thinks that she really should do something… kiss him, reach out to him, anything. But she can't, too affected by that one word to do much more than just remember to breathe. Sam just stands with her, not touching, just there, and she’s so profoundly grateful that she thinks about kissing him again, but instead she just nods with her eyes on the carpet, the television, the paper covering the walls between this room and the greenhouse, where most of the plants are back in their usual homes. Anywhere but on him.

The level of relief she feels, she knows, means she’s been waiting for this longer than she’s realized. She just didn’t have the words, the word, to put to it. And maybe love in Brigitte’s world has always been sort of a given, until everything got so fucked up. _‘Sisters, we’re_ forever. _’_

“Come on,” Sam finally says, voice soft enough that he doesn’t shock her back to this moment but rather tugs her, gently, as he pulls the covers down on the bed. Because they’re both just standing here while she remembers how to keep her lungs functioning. He’s very careful with her, she thinks, and sometimes she wishes he wouldn’t be, but also maybe she’s never felt so safe.

“Okay.”

**SAM**

She’s uncertain, nervous. He knows how she thinks this goes. It was how he used to think it went, too, but everyone he’s slept with before, he’d just slept with. Brief joining of bodies and saliva and whatever else. This is different,  _Brigitte's_ different, and he knows that. He knows that Brigitte rarely finds herself anywhere that isn’t inside her own head. She still doesn’t know how to translate her body to her mind and have that intensity be complete. She doesn't know how to make her thoughts quiet so she can just _feel_. But that's okay. He likes her like that. Maybe he likes the challenge. The times they’ve done this — only a handful, really, in a year — she flickers like a light between being physically immersed and not. He knows her well enough, now, to know that she approaches most things in her life like her body is an inconvenience; something she has to grudgingly remember to take care of because it’s the thing that keeps her mind running. And the last time they slept together, where she got her fingers into his mouth (which was the most fucking intimate thing he’s ever experienced during sex. His stomach still flips when he thinks of it), she was _there_ , then. She was in it. And he likes that he can get her to that place, because he knows it takes _so_ much trust. She gets this look, shakes like she’s about to step off a high dive, and then she does, and feeling her let go... that was so incredibly beautiful.

And Sam knows that there’s no way in _hell_ she’s about to do anything like that right now.

So they get into bed and he lies on his back so he isn’t facing her, isn’t crowding her in, and he’s so all over desire that it’s settled into him, heated and waiting. Sam ignores it. He shuts off the light and holds his arm out for her and she tucks herself against his side, against his chest. Sam holds her close, and gradually everything settles — in her, in him. They sleep.

~*

Brigitte, with an end goal in sight — forty-four days in counting until she’s done high school for good — really fucking buckles down. Sam thought that she worked hard before. Now it’s every night, every moment, she’s hidden behind those books, and he knows it’s not him, that she’s not being evasive, because she still stands close, still kisses him before she leaves for school, but honestly it’s like school, supper, dishes-if-it’s-her-turn, and then endless homework. Usually he ends up going to sleep without her, but she’s always there when he wakes up. He feels her, vaguely, when she comes to bed in the small hours of the morning.

“Hey… why’re you so… what’s all this?” Sam asks, just about halfway through November. _All this_. She’s got a veritable fortress of papers around her.

“I just have like… this recurring nightmare of failing something, and having to start the year over,” she says, without looking up.

He laughs. “When have you ever failed anything in school?” he asks.

She takes this breath, trying to focus on him. He can _see_ she's trying, but he's pulling her out of a quiter space. “Um, once when we were in primary school this teacher like, whacked Ginge in the back of the head and told her that if she didn’t do the project right he’d tell Pamela. So I ‘accidentally’ knocked his coffee thermos all over his desk and into his briefcase when we handed it in. I probably failed that class.”

“That doesn’t count. Anyway, how can you even do a project wrong in primary?”

Brigitte frowns down at her textbook. “She didn’t want to colour inside the lines.”

So he leaves her to it, if that’s what helps her get through. It’s not like it’s lonely — she’s always nearby. But he misses her anyway.

**BRIGITTE**

She thinks about Sam a lot. She thinks about Sam in the light of this new understanding of how she feels about him, and about how he never really does what she thinks he will. And she tries not to think about leaving the greenhouse, because that brings with it a whole other string of anxieties. Studying is usually something easy to lose herself in, except it’s getting harder and harder to ignore exactly which direction her thoughts have begun to drift when she doesn't keep a handle on them.

This morning, when she kissed him before leaving for school, it was hard to pull away. Normally she’s fast — maybe even kisses him at the corner of his mouth more than his lips, not because she doesn’t want to kiss him, but because it’s hard to kick her mind into a different gear afterwards, if she does. It’s hard to kiss him and then step out into the real world, because sometimes she can’t get all her walls up in time and that, she knows, is dangerous.

This morning, Sam was still half in bed, doing that thing where he contemplates getting up and then maybe, probably, will, but sometimes doesn’t. She’d kissed him properly — maybe because he looked sleepy and mussed and softer than usual. Maybe because the light caught his eyes in a pretty way. Maybe because she missed him, a little.

He’d slid his fingers along her cheek and into her hair where he caught hold of a strand of it, like he might not let her pull away, and she thought — just, _okay. I want you not to let me_ , and it surprised her, made her stomach flip a little, then fade into this slow, warm tension. So she didn’t step back, didn’t want to. And it was a bit awkward, maybe, because she’d been holding her bag, slung over her shoulder, back towards her hip and she had to lean down over him to reach his mouth, but she didn’t _feel_ awkward. All that was just background. Sam had touched her hip, just closing his hand there, fingertips finding bare skin beneath her sweater. He didn’t have to draw her closer because she was the one who moved, and Sam had tipped his head back to reach her mouth and something crackled between them, like lightning, and they both broke away at once.

“Aah— fuck,” Sam said, too soft to be just words. He’d almost sighed it, and Brigitte had taken a step back, breathless, the ache between her legs almost painful it was so intense because _she_ did that, she can do that to him..

He’d met her eyes, both of them contemplating just… _let’s keep going. Fuck school, fuck_ work _, let’s just—_

And then he’d said. “Okay. You’re gonna be late.” He broke the spell.

 _Sort of_ , she thinks, walking through the bright, chilly morning, because she can’t get it out of her head now. At least not until the school looms in the distance and the knots in her stomach cancel out anything else.

**SAM**

By evening, Sam still can’t get that morning out of his head. Brigitte's been writing some report or essay or something like it never happened, scratching things out and re-doing them, and he knows how she does this — she’s going to finish it, with all her edits and crossings-out, and then fucking re-write a clean copy because she’s insane. It’s very endearing. But still, he’s all disappointment because he knows he’s going to fall asleep alone again. Which sucks. Because he keeps coming back to this morning...

She’s been in his head all day, he can’t shake her. Not that he wants to.

He half thinks about asking her that evening, to give him five seconds of her attention, _Brigitte, hey, remember me?_ but then he doesn’t, because her focus is hard to break at the best of times and he’ll probably just be met with that eyes-down, soft-voiced irritation that’s halfway to apology, ‘I’m almost done’ — because he’s pulled her out of her thoughts.

Also, this morning…

_Christ._

He kisses her hair when he finally gets up from the couch and she goes still beneath it, stops working for that split second, but that’s all it is. He leaves her to it and goes to the bathroom to get ready for bed.

**BRIGITTE**

He leaves too quickly for her to even figure out what she wants to do. She sort of reaches to stop him leaving, but he’s already turned away, and all she gets is a brush of her fingertips against his shirt. He doesn’t notice. The light from the bathroom spreads across her, then fades as he pushes the door shut. She looks down at her work, chewing her lip. She’s done, she just has to re-write it. And maybe look something up, because she’s not sure she remembers right, and—

She twists a thread from the couch around her finger and pulls it loose, eyes glazing over as she stares at her first sentence. _Hypothesis: If caffeine releases dopamine in the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain relevant to mood regulation, then the use of coffee may decrease rather than worsen depressive episodes in some individuals…_

Hypothesis: if she is never able to ask for what she wants, then Sam is going to think she doesn’t want him at all.

She pushes her report off of her lap.

**SAM**

He almost crashes into her when he opens the bathroom door and gets out this startled _whoa_ and she says _I…_ and then she sort of shakes her head — shakes the beginning of her sentence out of the space between them — and she kisses him instead.

And it’s a good kiss. She’s twined her fingers in his hair already, and Sam grabs her by the hips and steps back so his spine is against the doorframe, pulling her against him. He’s not altogether that much taller than her, but she pushes herself up onto her toes to get closer, to kiss him harder, jesus. He loses his breath for a second, pulled under, but beneath his overwhelm, he’s thinking that this isn’t usual for her, and his surprise bubbles up to the surface in a soft laugh. Sam catches her face gently between both hands, meets her eyes, all dark and maybe just as caught off-guard as he is and says, using his best acting, “Sorry, _who_ are you?”

She tenses, and he can literally see her going into lockdown.

“Shut up,” she says, trying to play it off as just annoyance, but it isn’t just that, he’s embarrassed her, called her out on how often this doesn't happen, and he didn't mean to. He's thinking _shit, shit, shit,_ fix _it_ , and he stops her from pulling away. She’s stubborn though, so Sam steps around her before she can turn away from him completely, and walks her back against the wall. He twines his fingers through hers. He’s very careful, but he presses close — maybe closer than he should, and she doesn’t close her fingers around his.

“Hey,” he says, “hey, sorry.” He tries and finally manages to catch her eyes. She wavers at the edge of something, maybe an explanation. Sam wants her back to daring like she was a moment ago. He wants her to feel like she can be like that with him. That she can be however she wants, whenever she wants.

He pulls one of her hands up to his mouth, fingers still twined, hers holding much looser than his. His eyes on hers, he presses the edge of her index finger against his lips, kisses her softly there and he hears her breath catch. “I was thinking about you today,” Sam says, quiet, almost against her skin, and she drops her eyes, taking these soft, shallow breaths. “Thinking about that kiss...”

**BRIGITTE**

It’s so intimate. She doesn’t know how Sam can just say these things that she can barely even think to herself in her own head. He takes the very tips of her fingers into his mouth and she shuts her eyes, feels the softly insistent ache she’s been holding inside unfurl itself through every part of her, softly, like smoke. And then he bites her gently, between her fingernail beds and her first knuckle and she has to press back a sound. It’s really not fair that he can do that.

“I always think about you,” Sam whispers, barely audible, and Brigitte can’t, she can’t handle being the centre of his attention in words, she can’t handle how impossibly intimate it feels. Flushed hot she whispers, “Stop talking,” and kisses him again.

He takes her hands and pins them to the wall first just above her shoulders, then slides them up above her head and holds her there and she likes it at the same time as she wonders if she should. But she knows Sam would never hurt her. She trusts that he won’t, and they've been pushing all these  _shoulds_ and  _supposed tos_ aside all this time, so she stops worrying about it. He holds her there, and she likes it. Holding her like this, he’s forced her to be open. She can’t huddle into herself, can’t hunch her shoulders. He presses close to her, and they’re hip to hip, chest to chest, and he kisses her like he’s hungry for it. She wraps her fingers tight around his so that he doesn’t let her go.

**SAM**

Eventually, he sets about removing layers. Her sweater first, that’s easy, but then the buttons of her blouse are a nightmare, because they’re stiff, and there’s a lot of them, and he’s working at the top of her shirt and she, eventually taking pity on him, starts on the bottom.

Sam says “ _Christ_ ,” with real feeling, and Brigitte scoffs, but it turns into a laugh. She ducks her head, shoulders shaking with it, even though it’s mostly breath-silent. He hears it in her voice though as she pushes his hands away. “Let me do it.”

Okay, fine. He finds the hook and zip on her skirt and it pools at her feet. She gets her blouse off, then her tank top before she reaches for the hem of Sam's shirt, and he raises his arms so she can get it off. He just looks at her then, in that moment where they aren't touching. She's still wearing her underwear and knee socks. Her hair's all split ends, tangling around her shoulders. Sam steps back into her and kisses her mouth, cupping her face in his hands. He thinks he says her name.

**BRIGITTE**

Sam’s mouth is on her neck, on her stomach, on the insides of her thighs. He holds tight to her hips for a moment, cupping them against his palms — he does that, she doesn’t know why — and then he pulls her underwear off, her socks, and she holds his shoulder for balance. He takes the back of her leg and pulls it over his shoulder, he licks her cunt, and he’s so fucking soft about it that she starts to realize how 'not enough' can be worse than 'too much'. 

Eventually, all she can do is shake and twist these mean fistfuls of his hair, and try to draw him into her harder, but he won’t. He fucking _stops_ , steadies her on both feet again before he straightens up, grins at the exasperation in her eyes. Gently, he pulls her around by the wrist; eases her down onto the bed and follows her down. He kisses her shoulder, her collarbone. She gets his jeans undone but not off because he draws down too far. He kisses the crook of her elbow, her forearm, her wrist. He streaks these white hot lines across her skin. He lights up her veins

**SAM**

He slides one finger inside her, ring and index pressing the wetsilk folds of her own body against her clit, and fucks her that way, slowly. At the same time, he kisses her scarred palm, pulls her fingers into his mouth, sucks and drags his tongue over them until she’s saying _fuck, fuck, Sam_. Until she comes, and then they both just breathe until they’re steadier. This works for him because he’s almost at the edge, and she hasn’t even touched him.

In the interim, he sheds his clothes, then studies her face while her eyes are closed. He loves her like this, limbs loose, hair wild. She’s so unguarded, just for a handful of moments. “This is what drugs should feel like,” Brigitte informs the ceiling, and Sam huffs a laugh.

“Fuck,” he says, “if there were a drug that did that…”

“Instead drugs just feel like… fucked.”

“Fucked?” he repeats, all mischief and implication and he lights his palm softly against the thin, lunar-pale skin between her breasts, just to feel her heart beating.

She gives him a look. “The _other_ fucked. Fucked up.”

“Says you,” he says, and slides his hand down to the soft hollow of her belly, right beneath her ribs, and feels the breath she takes.

“I’m right,” she tells him.

Sam laughs, then leans down to kiss her, bites her lower lip until she smiles.

They kiss for a long while — so long and so slowly that the need in him fades, and they both almost fall asleep. Everything’s so hushed, the darkness soft around them. He’s between her thighs when he starts to get hard again, just from the proximity of her, just from the closeness, and the feeling of their breath, slightly out of sync. That wakes her a little, and she hooks her leg around his hip. He rolls her over onto her back to reach the condoms, and the way they move together is just as languid and unhurried as the kiss had been. Sam thinks he's never had anything like this. He wonders how he lived before it.

**BRIGITTE**

He rocks himself to climax inside her, and then he brings her off a second time in this impossible endless juncture where she feels like the whole world is about to break wide open and, by extension, herself — she’s going to tear apart at the seams, maybe, but then, when she finally comes, it’s soft and long and sweet, her body contracting around him again and again, forever, like waves pulling at the shore and he’s all _Brigitte Brigitte Brigitte_ like a litany against her skin.

Sam leaves the bed afterwards and she, unmoving, takes note of how sore her muscles will be in the morning because of the way she’d held herself so tightly just to reach that peak, but she thinks she’s learning how to do it now.

He comes back from the bathroom after a moment, and lies down on top of the covers with her again, half reclined. “Look what you did to me,” he says.

There’s these long pinkish weals from her fingernails over his good shoulder and she, in this poker-faced sarcastic tone, says: “Wow, that looks really serious,” dry as a desert, because it’s barely a mark compared to the scars on his right, and for some reason, that’s hilarious, or maybe she’s just fucking blissed, but they’re both laughing, and it’s so good.

She really never imagined it could be like this.

**SAM**

It’s almost January, almost Christmas, and in the last two months he’s taken care of the greenhouse stuff — he’s sold the plants or found them homes in people’s gardens or living rooms or workplaces. Turns out he knows a lot of people, even if he isn’t even really acquaintances with them. And then it’s just glass walls and empty planters and he’s picking out roots that have grown all the way down into the crumbling brick.

It’s sort of sad, losing them. The plants. Maybe that’s stupid, but Sam can’t just treat them like the furniture he tosses or sets out at the end of the road and marks FREE. The place feels different without them, and he thinks he’s the only one that gets it until Brigitte comes home from her very last day of class ever, at the start of winter break and just stops in the emptiness of the main greenhouse, just inside the front door. Their eyes meet across empty planters, across the tools that hang on the iron supports that look skeletal and out of place without all that greenery, and she says “It feels like it’s time to go,” and yeah, he’s got to agree.

She graduates in January, just like she expected to. He didn’t expect anything different, and they wait until they can pick up her certificate and whatever else they need, and then that’s it.

**BRIGITTE**

That’s it, she’s free.

It feels totally unreal. And then there’s nothing stopping them other than the deconstruction of the place they’ve both lived for so many months. And once she’s graduated, they deal with it fast, like neither of them can bear to linger over it. What they decide to take they pile onto the bed. Even between the two of them it’s almost nothing. It’s her photographs, Sam’s black pillar candle, his pot, dried and bagged, and rolling papers (he trashes the bong), and the wooden box filled now with both the monkshood and the amber-bottled St. John’s Wart, as well as the blueish stone he gave to her. There’s Ginger’s bird skull looped around Brigitte’s neck with her own. There’s cigarettes and some of Sam’s CDs, her camera, and the books neither of them could bear to part with, and a couple bags of clothes. Everything they’re taking fits on the bed, except for the black orchid, which has survived until now and, Sam says, should survive the driving. Everything else is cleared out.

They’ll sleep here tonight and leave in the morning, that’s the plan. Together, they put everything into boxes or bags or crates and carry it out to the van. It’s new moon dark, and so cold their fingers freeze and their breath mists in front of them, and Brigitte thinks: if this were a horror movie something would come tearing and screaming from the woods, all roaring and hot animal breath, and blood. Fade to black. But it isn’t, and nothing comes for them. Sam shuts the van doors and that’s it. They’re packed. They’re ready.

In the light spreading out over the snow from the greenhouse, he lights a cigarette and she moves close so she can share it with him, share his warmth. He gives it to her and watches her drag on it, their shoulders hunched against the wind, and then he steps forward and puts his arm around her so they’re almost chest to chest. She turns only enough so that she can smoke, and they look at the van with all their earthly possessions inside, their ticket out of this place, and Sam says “D’you think we should paint it?”

She considers this. “No, don’t.”

She smokes and Sam presses his lips to her hair, buries his face in it, but after a moment he draws away with a soft “Oh yeah.” From his pocket he pulls out her silver ring, the one she thought she lost forever ago. He holds it out to her in his open palm.

“Where was it?” she asks, taking it from him, but she doesn’t put it on.

“Under the bed. Way back in the corner.”

She can feel his eyes on her as she tests the ring size against his fingers. It fits his smallest, and she slides it on without saying a word. Sam closes his fingers into a loose fist, unused to the feeling of metal against his skin, then he meets her eyes. “I love you, Brigitte.”

She opens her mouth to say it back, but she can’t. She can’t because she does, and it’s too much, it’s too big for a sentence, too big for tonight.

Sam smiles at her. “I know,” he says. “Now c’mon, it’s freezing.”

He keeps his arm around her shoulders and together they go back inside.

**SAM**

She doesn’t say anything as they walk back into the room. It feels unfamiliar now that it’s been emptied — everything sounds different, feels different. Brigitte stops in the centre of his room and looks at the bed, the last thing left in here, and he can see something unravelling in her face that looks like longing and fear and hope all mixed up. She meets his eyes. “Let’s go now,” she says, and there's this underlying urgency. “Let’s just go.”

And he doesn’t know why, but it feels right. Like if they stay here, it’s eating the fruit from the fairy table, it’s trapping themselves in a world that isn’t meant for them anymore. If they sleep here, they’ll be here forever. It's like every story he's ever heard where the protagonist doesn't get out when they should, when they still could. The message seems to be that nothing can grow like that, stagnant and waiting. Feeling ready isn't a real feeling, it's just something you do on purpose. And maybe these are foolish thoughts, foolish worries, but Sam's been foolish before, believing in lycanthropes against all odds, and look at where it got him. Look where they are, now.

“Okay,” he tells her, “Let’s go.”

They strip the bed of its blankets — things to keep — and they shut the lights off in the greenhouse one last time.

**BRIGITTE**

Brigitte doesn’t know why she cries for this place. She’s always wanted to leave Bailey Downs, but the greenhouse, Sam’s, always felt so on the outside of that. And maybe a part of her really did want to stay there forever but, she thinks now, that maybe it was always meant to be transitory. A beautiful, ephemeral space to learn how to live.

Sam’s quiet. The headlights cut through the night, and neither of them knows where they’re going to go from here, only that they’re going.

She dries her cheeks on her sleeves and cracks the window to let in the cold night air, to hear the rush of wind in her ears.

**SAM**

It’s strange, he thinks, that all this started with something so violent. A horn blaring, squeal of his tires on the street, blood and guts and rot and the twitching corpse of something not entirely animal or entirely human. Maybe things can only grow from liminal moments, liminal things. Or maybe it started when he almost died in that unfamiliar basement. Or maybe it was the moment Brigitte found him in his hospital room — both of them infected, both of them thinking they were the last one left. Maybe it was the very first time he saw her, sitting in the grass with her sister before the wildness took Ginger. Maybe it was when they found a way to stop it.

So here’s what Sam knows as they approach the sign — the one that faces opposite and says _Welcome to Bailey Downs_ : He and Brigitte both became wild anyway, wild in a way that doesn’t lead to self-demolition. In a way that strips them both to their very skeletons in front of one another and still ends with not leaving the wreckage they find there — seeing something beautiful instead. Maybe they had to be free like that in order to step outside of socially constructed boundaries, to not become their parents, to leave this place. To feel like they _deserved_ to leave it.

To live.

They’ve found out how to be wild in a different way, and the big wide world is out there, and the Canadian wilderness is infinite, waiting for someone to create spaces inside of it that become sacred, and, after winter ends, spring always comes and green things find the light again.

**BRIGITTE**

Before they pass the sign, Brigitte pulls Ginger’s necklace over her head and wordlessly ties it to the rearview mirror. She’ll find another place for it when they settle somewhere new but, like Ginge, it was never meant for a box anyway. And Brigitte can’t wear it around her neck anymore.

They pass the sign.

They’re out. Both of them, all of them. And there are no signs welcoming them to the rest of the world, but she doesn’t need them. She’s learned to read other things now — the earth, the possibility of energy moving in the right directions at the right times, and the feeling of Sam's fingers as he reaches out and takes her hand. She holds back, tight, and trusts that he can read her, too, even without the words. Brigitte’s heart beats hard against her ribs reminding her that she’s alive, and suddenly her life opens up to her — what it might be — cracks open inside her like a seed inside her chest, and she takes a breath.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ac0rntea, who has provided a boatload of my motivation for this fic has also, on TOP of everything, made a beautiful, perfect playlist for this story that you can find here on 8tracks: https://8tracks.com/embers-ashes/the-constellations-reveal-themselves-one-star-at-a-time-1
> 
> I wrote this story for me, but I think it became yours, too.


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